Future of StoryTelling is a two-day summit that brings together top executives, creative talent, and technologists to explore how storytelling is changing in the digital age. Attendance to the annual NYC-based event, held in early October, is by invitation only, and limited to 500 attendees. The FoST summit was founded in 2012 by Charles Melcher, President and Founder of Melcher Media.
FoST Films
FoST produces an annual series of speaker films that are released leading up to the October summit. These films are free and available online to the public, and also serve as a preview for the topics that are addressed by speakers at the event. The 2012 FoST Film series featured sixteen short films with speakers such as Damian Kulash of OK Go, Aaron Koblin of Google’s Data Arts Team, and Richelle Parham, VP and CMO of eBay. The 2013 FoST Film series included twenty films with speakers such as Angela Ahrendts, former CEO of Burberry, Robert Wong, CCO of Google Creative Lab, and Eddy Moretti, CCO of Vice Media. All the films can be found on the official Future of StoryTelling .
FoST Roundtables
Rather than giving talks from a main stage, FoST speakers lead 60-minute, think tank¬–style conversations with groups of approximately 25 attendees. Attendees screen the FoST Films in advance of the summit and can select their preferred speaker-lead roundtables. The format is designed to be interactive and engaging for every person in the room. FoST offers the roundtable experience online through a weekly series of speaker-lead Hangouts on Google Plus. Every Wednesday at 12:30pm EST, a different summit speaker joins Founder Charles Melcher for a professionally facilitated, live-streamed conversation. These “Virtual Roundtables” give viewers an opportunity to submit questions to FoST speakers during the broadcast.
Location
The FoST summit takes place at Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island, an architecturally and historically significant site that was built in the mid-1800s as a home for retired sailors. Attendees meet in lower Manhattan and are transported by private ferry across New York Harbor to the 83-acre waterfront campus.
The Story Crawl
In 2013, FoST announced the launch of an experimental, day-long program called the Story Crawl. Limited to only 80 attendees, the Story Crawl consisted of one-hour-long visits to four New York City creative studios: Fake Love, Rockwell Lab, Stink Digital, and Sub Rosa. Attendees had the chance to learn about each studio's latest innovations and learn about their concept development, creative process, and distinct approaches to storytelling. On October 1, 2014, the FoST Story Crawl will expand to all 500 FoST attendees across over a dozen studio locations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Story Crawl marks the first day of the two-day FoST experience, and is followed by the FoST summit at Snug Harbor on October 2.
The Future of StoryTelling is produced by Melcher Media, an NYC-based firm that develops the editorial content, design, and interactive engineering for fully immersive user experiences. Known for its history of innovation, Melcher Media has been a leader in book publishing since 1994, producing 22 New York Times bestsellers and putting 13 million copies of books into print. The company produced Al Gore's Our Choiceapp for the iPad, which won Apple’s award for Best-Designed App in 2011. More recently, the company collaborated with director J.J. Abrams on his first book project, titled S.
