by Emma Bello

How Does Storytelling Become A Way To Learn Math?

by Emma Bello, Academy Student

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Storytelling is such a fascinating mode of communication and preservation between people, experiences, and various time periods. In my experience,art and math have always been separated from each other, as they seemed too different to ever be combined in an interesting and relevant way.

To Finally Feel is proof that this kind of thinking is wrong and that every part of learning can work together to create something meaningful, such as telling a story. To Finally Feel began as a math assignment to write an imaginative story relating to a specific topic or issue within the confines of exploring what AI is, prior to diving into the mathematics of AI. The end product consisted of a story of emotion and connection being told through audio and visual elements in the form of a video. In brief, To Finally Feel follows two characters, Hollis,a tree spirit, and Nox, an AI robot who got lostin the deepest part of the forest. This story is magical and warm as Hollis explains to Nox what it means to understand and feel emotion, eventually giving up her own soul so that Nox can become human and finally begin to feel. When I was brainstorming about what to write my story about, I was heavily influenced by Soul, a 2020 film by Pixar Animation Studios. Pixarhas always captured my admiration, as I have always been fascinated by the way they storytell, not only through stunning visuals, but also the emotionally captivating composition and use of music in their films. Prior to making To Finally Feel, I had watched Soul and had been completely obsessed with the soundtrack. Multiple composers and many musicians worked on the soundtrack, but I wasspecifically drawn to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ contributions, and more specifically the tracks: Just Us, Falling,and The Great Before/U Seminar. Paired with the animation, these tracks seemedto capture what physical touch sounds like. I took this element in account when creating the music for To Finally Feel and paid special attention to enhancing what I was saying in the story and whatwas visually on screen through the music in the background.

The last element to the project was putting together the video and ensuring it would be visually interesting. As much as I would have likedto have it acted out, I am not an actor or a filmmaker, so I resorted to pulling together stockfootage as well as my own footage from childhood and editing them to communicate what was happening in the story.

For some people, math is not a favorite subject, that being because they simply do not like it, or because it’s hard to understand. In a lot of cases,storytelling does not seem like a relevant way to grasp what is going on, but I believe that the skillof bridging two unlikely subjects like art and math is what can be drawn from the creation of To FinallyFeel.

Still images from the short: To Finally Feel, by Emma Bello.