Digital Storytelling Festival

Next Exit

Interview

Next Exit

Corporate Consulting

Next Exit and Dana changed my life. In 1993 a digital media tsunami washed over San Francisco-the second gold rush. In January of that year, Dana dragged me to a meeting of the local Interactive Communication Society. It felt like a nerdy version of a Students for a Democratic Society meeting in 1968. Instead of the social revolution, they were talking about the information revolution, but with equal amounts of idealism and passion.

In the next few weeks Dana, programmer Patrick Milligan, and I went down to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where Dana was to perform Next Exit and conduct a workshop on personal storytelling using digital video. The workshop went amazingly well, so well, in fact, that by early summer my partners and I decided to close down our theater, lay off a staff of 12, and move into a small studio to carry out our various work interests. Coincidentally the studio next to Dana's opened up, and we moved in. Within months, Dana and I had fashioned a plan to open a center dedicated to pursuing digital storytelling. By the spring of 1994, joined by my wife Nina Mullen, the San Francisco Digital Media Center was launched.
Over the past four years, Next Exit has toured the world and has led Dana to a number of new ventures in both multimedia production for publication and into the realm of professional presentations and corporate attractions. Most recently he designed the Digital Storytelling Theater for the World of Coca-Cola, Las Vegas. He has also worked on corporate presentations with Douglas Ivester, the CEO of Coca-Cola, and Bill Dauphinais, a vice president at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The following conversation covers Dana's work in the corporate arena during the past few years and his thoughts about the phenomenon of digital storytelling.

Page 4/4