NOTE: I know, I know. This is a meandering post. It’s an idea that’s been banging around in my head for months and I’ve been trying to land on a way to articulate it. It’s still choppy.

I work in marketing. And like literally everyone who works in marketing, if money were no object, I’d spend my time writing novels and screenplays rather than B2B tech websites. But we live in a capitalism, and a good marketing job is like some kind of fucked up modern day equivalent of the old patronage system. I guess.

One of the things about working in marketing is that you’re exposed to a lot of cringey bullshit. People calling themselves ninjas and rockstars. And my favorite – storytellers.

You’re not a storyteller, Jan. You’re a group director who makes powerpoints about the customer journey.

Maybe that’s where my aversion to storytelling comes from. It’s a sullied term.

But it gets thrown around modeling circles like some kind of higher calling. And not by the usual chuds. By people I genuinely like and respect.

So let me break down my problem with the term, and then I’ll get around to what I prefer instead.

We’re not telling complete stories

In terms of story, a model (or figure or diorama) isn’t all that different from a painting or a photograph. It’s a snapshot. A point in time. A single scene within a larger story.

David’s famous Oath of the Horatii is a great example of this. It’s a fascinating snapshot, right? But if you have no additional information, what’s the story here?

Three dudes are making Hitler salutes at some swords. The guy holding the swords looks like he’s doing some razzle dazzle with them, but maybe instead he almost dropped one. Considering he’s wearing sandals, that’d be a bad move.

Off to the side, the women are bored of the men’s silly little game. They wanted to go to the antiques market. And the mom in the back is kicking herself for not bringing the iPad.

Of course that’s not it at all, right? Because with motherfucking context, the viewer knows that this is the three Horatius brothers swearing an oath to fight the three Curiatii brothers from Alba Longa to settle a dispute between the two cities. It’s all about loyalty to your country, and a willingness to sacrifice for the good of that country, with your life if necessary. On the eve of the French Revolution, these appeals to loyalty and country hit different, you know?

But the painting by itself is not a story. It’s not storytelling. It’s shorthand. It’s a collection of references. It’s Livy fan service, so all those antiquity-eating dickwads in 18th century France could do this:

Snapshots don’t even tell the right story half the time. Consider this image from protests in Vancouver in 2011.

It’s a quite evocative shot, absolutely. But you’ll often see it captioned as a couple kissing amid the chaos. In reality, the young woman was injured or pepper sprayed or something like that, and he was trying to help her.

It’s still a great shot, but the story that so many assume it’s telling isn’t the story that’s actually happening.

Here’s one that I think gets closer.

What’s going on here? Clearly we’re in some kind of hospital situation. The doctor on the left looks done. Done with what? There’s a rat’s nest of tubes and wires that adds to the sense of chaos and complexity. In the back corner, another person in scrubs is slumped against the wall. Maybe they’re sleeping.

But what’s the medical issue? Is this a trauma patient that they couldn’t save? Is it a famous person? Is it the first successful something or other procedure? Is this from COVID?

This image doesn’t convey enough information to tell an unmistakable story. What it does is convey a feeling. A feeling of absolute, bone weary exhaustion. It’s a very depleting vibe. Even if you don’t know exactly what’s going on, you do know that the people in this room have been fucking through it.

And to me that, THAT. The feeling. The vibe. The emotion that this photograph brings out of me. That’s the good stuff. That, to me, is the art. That’s the human connection. I don’t need to know the story. I don’t need to know exactly what happened. I just know it sucked.

Okay, I do know the story behind this one. Everyone reading this should. But even without the broader context, the image evokes hard-won triumph and teamwork.

It’s the feels

Storytelling is a weird thing to aim for. Pictures and paintings are context-dependent. If you know the story, they show you the thing you know and you get that little dopamine treat. It’s also in my opinion a poor use of modeling as a medium. Even among a knowledgable audience of fellow modelers, your hit rate for context may not be more than 50%.

I’m still circling what I think I’d prefer as an aiming point. But one of them is absolutely feels.

It’s the vibe. It’s the energy. It’s the emotion a piece elicits.

That’s why the stereotypical “Germans pointing” scenes are so painfully dull. There’s nothing evoked. If it’s telling a story, it’s of a roadside break because the oberstormfuckstick got lost. That’s a boring story.

But there are all kinds of things a piece can evoke. It can be straight up emotions – sorrow, guilt, wonder, amusement. It can be a sensation. Baking hot metal simmering in the desert sun. The weightless sensation of a car leaving the ground. The ick of a swamp.

Weathering forensics

One interesting side branch of the storytelling discussion is the way that Will Pattison describes it. Not so much a scene telling a story, but the wear and tear on a machine needing to have a consistent story. Every chip, every patch of rust, every leak should have a story. How it got there. When it got there in relation to everything else.

I don’t know that storytelling is the right term for this concept, but I do like the concept and it fits with something that personally resonates far more than some vague idea of “storytelling”.

There’s probably a German word for it

I very much gravitate toward what I guess I’d call a “sense of story”. Not storytelling per se. Not looking at a model and understanding a little narrative. But looking at a model and thinking “I bet that tank/plane/ship/whatever saw some shit.” Like a former boxer with a broken nose or a dance hall with well worn floorboards, there’s a feeling of experience, of a life lived. Of a certain time and place. It’s a feeling I’ve had walking among Roman ruins, or touring the siege lines at Vicksburg, or poking around warbirds in a museum. Hell, I think it even explains why I prefer unrestored vehicles and why I prefer weathered and battered examples of things. They’ve lived a life. They’ve been through shit.

And to Will’s engineering mind that seeks sense and order above all else, of course there’s going to be a preoccupation with getting those details correct and conducting a bit of forensic analysis to understand how those chips got there, why that stain appears there but not over there, and so on.

But here’s the thing. That story? That’s deep lore. That’s Tolkien’s appendices. You don’t need to know Elvish to enjoy Lord of the Rings. You don’t even need to know that Tolkien just like…made languages. But even if you don’t know the story, there’s that sense of depth, of richness, of history and culture. That’s the thing that I’m after. That sense. That atmosphere. And sometimes, that takes the modeling equivalent of inventing a language. Conveying an authentic-seeming world, even if it’s just in the way the paint is worn on a grab handle or how mud is spattered on the side of a fender.

Here’s a fun example of what I’m talking about. Look at the way the paint is cooked away on the business end of the M270 MLRS launcher box. The bare metal, green, and pink tones going on there. You don’t need to know where it is or what it’s doing to piece together that that patterning is from a lot of rocket launches. It’s like MLRS tree rings.

There’s not much of a story going on here. But there’s definitely a sense that this thing is between stories. It’s taking a rest.

Where does this leave us?

Honestly, I don’t know. The idea of “storytelling” doesn’t do much for me. But creating complex, compelling models that have a sense of experience? That go beyond just being the same basic shape as their representation? I really think there’s something in that. That’s what makes a model more than the sum of its plastic and paint and decals. That’s what elevates the best ones to art.