"Always wanted to stand on the red carpet and now I'm here." "But what's brought me and hundreds of others here to the premiére of a Hollywood blockbuster in London's Leicester Square?" "The answer is the extraordinary power of feature film to tell a story." "Stories that terrify us," "Stories that enchant us," "And stories that inspire us," "But the power of visual storytelling is not a modern phenomenon," "Feature films today are using techniques developed way back in the distant past," "For thousands of years, artists grappled with ways to bring their stories alive, to engage their audience," "This is the story of how our ancient ancestors made the discoveries that have given film such a hold over our imaginations." "Every year, seven billion people throughout the world pay money to do this," "Sit down in front of a large screen and watch pictures tell a story," "Ma!" "Oh, Ma!" "You'll be all right." "You'll be all right!" "Ma!" "Ma!" "Ma-a-a-a!" "Ma-a-a-a!" "When we watch a really good film, something extraordinary happens," "We become so involved with what's going on we feel as though we're living in the story ourselves," "Visual storytelling has a unique power over our imaginations," "It captivates us," "Home, pig." "This is George Miller, the man responsible for a series of box office hits including "Babe"," "It's the Job of the storyteller to engage an audience as much as you can." "You bring to bear all your techniques and knowledge of film-making in order to enchant the audience, to have them suspend their disbelief, to actually believe what's happening before them," "But storytelling was not invented with film, which is only 100 years old, and television, which is only half a century," "It goes right back to the beginning of human engagement, really," "So, how did film get its ability to transport us to other worlds?" "Where did the ingredients come from that give it such a compelling hold over us?" "To find out, we need to trace the art of visual storytelling right back to its ancient origins, and what better place to start than at the very dawn of civilisation?" "This is Mesopotamia, in the desert sands of the Middle East," "So many of the things we take for granted today originated here," "Farming, mathematics, writing, they all started between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates," "But the reason we've come to Mesopotamia is because it was here in the 19th century that a British archaeologist made a revelatory discovery," "His name was Austin Henry Layard," "Layard and his team were excavating ancient sites throughout Mesopotamia and found many treasures," "But far and away the most intriguing of these was a cache of 25,000 broken clay tablets covered with unreadable markings," "The tablets were brought back to London and painstakingly reassembled," "The markings were found to be the world's first written language, cuneiform," "Scholars originally assumed that the tablets were just court records or accounts, but then, after years of study, their code was finally cracked," "Some of these tablets actually told a story," "It was the first story ever written," "It was a story that began and ended in the first city ever built, a city in what is now southern Iraq, called Uruk," "Built 6,000 years ago, Uruk was for many centuries the world's largest city, with walls that ran for more than five miles and a population of almost half a million," "Today, sadly, war and the encroaching desert have all but destroyed this wonder of the ancient world," "But what has survived is the story that this city inspired," "The city of Uruk lives on through the fame of the legendary king who built its walls." "His name was Gilgamesh and he was the world's first great hero." "The story of Gilgamesh tells of one man's search for eternal life," "In a series of daring adventures, Gilgamesh defeats monsters and challenges the gods before returning home to his beloved Uruk," "So compelling was this story of an action hero that it was passed down for generations and 4,000 years after it was first told it's still popular today here in the Middle East," "I found a copy of this ancient bestseller in a bookshop in Kuwait City," "The story of Gilgamesh had exploited the universal human desire for a hero," "Most great stories have a hero," "The Star Wars trilogy had a number of heroic characters, but Luke Skywalker in the first part of it," "But I don't think a person can declare themselves to be the hero." "A hero is defined by the actions that they undergo." "A hero is defined by the events that happen to them and, indeed, the response, the spiritual and moral response to those events." "For Gilgamesh there was one event above all that symbolised his heroism, when he single-handedly attacked and killed a pride of lions," "The story of Gilgamesh as a heroic figure spread across the Middle East," "Kings and princes from Persia to ancient Egypt, they were all eager to exploit his fame," "One king in particular sought to promote himself by capitalising on the hero's power and glamour." "This was Ashurbanipal, the King of Assyria, what's now northern Iraq." "We know that Ashurbanipal liked the story of Gilgamesh, he had several copies of it in his library, but Ashurbanipal had one big problem." "In 645 B,C, hardly anyone could read a script like cuneiform, so how could Ashurbanipal use the heroic qualities of Gilgamesh to promote himself in the minds of his people?" "Ashurbanipal's solution was ground-breaking." "He departed from a story told in words and devised instead a story told through pictures, with himself, not Gilgamesh, playing the lead role." "In a series of carved images," "Ashurbanipal shows himself, like Gilgamesh before him, as a supreme lion-slayer," "The frieze is made up of four images," "In the first, a servant lifts the gate on a cage, releasing a lion," "The lion springs out and runs towards Ashurbanipal," "As it leaps into mid-air, it's struck by an arrow," "In a final image, Ashurbanipal finishes off the lion with a sword stabbed through its body," "The sculptors want us to share the thrill of the action," "They've created a series of freeze-frames capturing the excitement of the moment, and dominating the frieze is its hero, Ashurbanipal," "Originally, these magnificent friezes would have been painted in bright vivid colours," "Ashurbanipal had them prominently displayed on the walls of the throne room of his great palace at Nineveh," "Although the palace no longer exists, using the archaeological remains, we've reconstructed what it might once have looked like," "Ashurbanipal's story could be appreciated not just by those select few who could read, but by everyone who could see," "But in itself that wasn't enough." "Imagine watching a film in which the hero only appears in one scene." "So what we need to find next is a story that develops, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end." "In short, a gripping yarn." "Ashurbanipal himself seems to have understood this, because it was he who created what's probably the world's first really complete visual story," "Ashurbanipal had a new series of reliefs made for his palace," "They told the story of his war with his enemies the Elamites," "It's like a storyboard for an epic blockbuster with a cast of thousands," "The story begins with the Elamites, identified by their headbands, being driven from their camp by King Ashurbanipal's troops," "During a mighty battle, the Battle of Til Tuba, the Elamites are forced to retreat into the river," "Soon it's running red with their blood," "According to Ashurbanipal, the river was choked with corpses for three long days," "These graphic images are as explicit as any you would see in a contemporary feature film," "A bird is tearing out a soldier's eye," "And here one of Ashurbanipal's henchmen is holding the hair of the Elamite king Teumman, severing his head from his body," "The head is carried as a trophy through the enemy lines," "After the battle, King Ashurbanipal and his queen celebrate their victory in an idyllic garden scene surrounded by their courtiers," "But this story has a final gory twist," "Fastened to one of the trees is the bloody head of Teumman," "It's a grim reminder of the fate that would befall others who challenged the mighty Ashurpanipal's rule," "The Battle of Til Tuba was shown using visual storytelling techniques that had never been seen before." "What we've got here is a complex tale unfolding over many scenes." "But not only does it have a beginning, middle and end, it's got these subplots which make the whole story more intriguing." "As the battle with the Elamites rages, something else is happening," "A group of prisoners are being forced to grind down the bones of their ancestors to make bread," "Imagine what it would have been like for visitors to see this story on the wall of the great hall in Nineveh," "You wouldn't have had to speak the Assyrian language to get the point," "The Assyrians laid the foundations of visual storytelling." "They established two key elements, a hero and a plot, but, as any movie mogul today would be able to tell us, there's something critical missing here." "Look again at these reliefs." "While there's lots of blood and violence, here Teumman is having his head lopped off," "no one seems to mind," "There's no rage, no tears, no emotion," "and as a result it's hard to be involved in the story, let alone to care what happens next," "We Just don't feel engaged with these characters, let alone suspend our disbelief and enter into their world in our imaginations." "So, when and how did ancient artists make us care?" "To find our answer, we have to leave the Middle East," "We need to come to the northern shores of the Mediterranean... .. because here there was another ancient civilisation with a rich tradition of vivid, evocative storytelling." "It's a civilisation that's left us with some of the most exciting and visually arresting stories that have ever been told." "Who else but the Greeks?" "If any civilisation could find a way to create characters people could believe in and care about, then the Greeks could," "The Greeks were obsessed with their epic stories, their myths, and there was one myth above all that the Greeks liked to visualise, Homer's tale of Odysseus," "Here on the coastline of Sperlonga in southern Italy," "Greek artists converted this enormous cave into a dining room where guests were lavishly fed and entertained," "Today the cave is empty but in the first century B,C, diners would have been surrounded by marble sculptures depicting key scenes from the story of Odysseus," "They'd be seen at their best not during the day but at night-time by the light of flickering torches." "The statues are now in a museum, but with the aid of computer graphics we can reunite them with their original location in the exact positions they were placed in over 2,000 years ago," "This monumental sculpture illustrates an incident in the dramatic story of Odysseus's encounter with the giant Cyclops," "But how do these sculptures advance visual storytelling?" "Well, first you need to know the story," "The Cyclops, a giant one-eyed cannibal, traps Odysseus and his shipmates in a cave," "Although they fear for their lives, they have an escape plan," "Odysseus cunningly offers the monster some wine." "It's a new drink for the Cyclops." "He likes it and asks for some more." "Then he asks Odysseus what his name is." ""They call me Nobody," replies Odysseus." ""Well, Nobody," grunts the Cyclops," ""I shall eat you last of all." ""That shall be your reward. "" "The Cyclops soon becomes drowsy with drink and slumps to the floor of the cave," "Odysseus and his companions seize their chance," "They drive a stake into the single eye of the giant," "What the sculptors have chosen to show us is the moment of maximum tension just before the climax," "But why?" "Because it's at this moment the characters' emotions are at their most revealing," "We know what they're thinking and feeling," "By depicting realistic emotions" "Greek artists had found a way to bring their stories alive," "This is no longer a story that Just tells you what happens, but how it happened." "It's got psychological credibility." "It wants to show you how people are feeling." "As such, it marks a crucial development in the history of visual storytelling and, of course, if you care about what's happening to the characters you'll want to know what happens next." "The blind Cyclops staggers around the cave shrieking with pain and shouting for help from the other giants," "They want to know who's attacking him," "His reply is, "Nobody!" ""Nobody's attacking me!"" "And this allows our quick-witted hero to escape," "Bringing characters alive so that we can relate to them and identify with their predicaments is a crucial element in any visual story," "even if the character involved is a pig," "Come, pig." "In order to tell a story, obviously you need a character or characters with whom the audience can engage." "It's one of the reasons why actors who have a degree of charisma are so important to a story." "In the case of a talking-animal picture, you need a way of taking your central characters and humanising them to some degree so that the audience can engage even more," "With the lion-killing exploits of King Ashurbanipal artists discovered a strong heroic lead," "With his battle scenes they invented a gripping story-line, and in the cave of Sperlonga the Greeks showed how to create characters an audience could begin to identify with emotionally," "But so far, none of them had combined all these ingredients into a single visual narrative." "Well, not, that is, until about a hundred years after the birth of Christ when the Romans constructed the world's most ambitious storytelling monument." "Welcome to TraJan's Column in the heart of Rome." "It's a towering achievement and, quite literally, the highest form of storytelling that there is." "At 35 metres high, the marble column stood above all other buildings in ancient Rome," "The Column was built by the Emperor Trajan," "It commemorates his victory in the war against his enemies the Dacians in what is today modern Romania," "The spoils of these wars paid not just for the Column but also for the surrounding complex of markets, libraries, squares and public monuments of Trajan's Forum," "Alas, today the Forum is little more than rubble," "TraJan's Column alone has survived because for almost 2,000 years it's held a fascination for some of the most powerful men in history." "Napoléon Bonaparte admired the Column so much he wanted it dismantled and brought to Paris," "He was only dissuaded when told it wouldn't survive the journey," "The Column was also special to the Italian dictator Mussolini," "When the Second World War broke out, he had it protected by bombproof cladding," "So, what was it about the Column that so impressed Roman citizens, foreign emperors, fascist dictators and modern tourists alike?" "Well, it was here that all the visual storytelling discoveries of the ancient world came together." "Over a continuous 200-metre-long frieze, we've got a complex tale," "It spirals around the monument 23 times and tells the detailed story of Trajan's campaign against the Dacians," "It's been called a movie epic frozen in stone," "In Emperor Trajan we have an undisputed hero," "He appears as a powerful and dignified leader in almost every scene," "Over the monument as a whole, he appears 59 times," "We've also got our villain, the Dacian leader Decebalus, crafty, scheming, convincingly evil," "And we've got an epic supporting cast of two and a half thousand extras, whose emotions and feelings are made individually apparent," "But that's Just the start." "As a masterpiece of visual storytelling, TraJan's Column has so much more." "It was even anticipating certain film techniques that directors today would be familiar with." "Here the sculptor has depicted a tree, but this isn't just to adorn the landscape," "This tree has a more important role," "The sculptors used it to divide two distinct scenes just as today a film director would use a visual cut," "Elsewhere the sculptors have used another visual device that's familiar to film-makers today," "They've chosen to show the Roman army buried under their shields, from above," "It's called a bird's-eye view," "They've also chosen to show other soldiers involved in the same scene with a different viewpoint, from a lower angle," "What the sculptors realised is that by offering multiple viewpoints they could make the battle more dramatic," "There isn't a film-maker today who does not exploit these same visual techniques," "Cinema is a kind of visual music that you play, with the colours and instrumentations, as you would in an orchestra, so with various shots." "So there is a difference between the close-up and the wide shot and so on." "But the creators of Trajan's Column had yet another trick up their sleeves," "They found a way of summarising the most dramatic moments of their story," "By looking up the northwest vertical axis, the viewer could see at a glance a highlighted version of this epic," "It goes something like this," "One emperor wants to conquer the world," "No one stands in his way," "Except one man who is prepared to sacrifice all to save his people," "War is inevitable," "Torture," "Arson," "Betrayal," "But only one side has the support of the gods," "Only one side can win ultimate victory," "There you go, the world's first ever trailer," "Trajan's Column seems to have everything," "It's the culmination of thousands of years of discoveries in the art of telling stories with pictures," "I would love to say that, looking at it, I feel deeply moved," "But I've got to confess that I don't," "It may have grabbed the imaginations of ancient Romans but I don't think it does very much for us today," "It's hard to believe, even when you're standing close to this monument, that you've been taken on a virtual Journey to the killing fields of Romania." "It Just doesn't do it." "Even though it uses so many of the storytelling devices of modern-day films, it hasn't got the power to captivate us and that's not just because the pictures aren't in motion," "Trajan's Column seems to be missing a final element," "But perhaps we've been looking in the wrong places," "We wouldn't be the first to do so," "This is Cambridge University, where I work," "For centuries, the great centres of learning had looked exclusively to the West for the answers to their questions," "Scholars believed that it was the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome that had made the great breakthroughs in the ancient world," "But, Just like us on our quest, they began to realise that maybe the classical civilisations didn't hold all of the answers." "Yes, what the Greeks and Romans had achieved was truly astonishing but it wasn't the true story and so researchers began to look elsewhere." "Researchers began to explore parts of the world much further afield," "They started to investigate cultures that until then had been totally ignored," "What they discovered will give us the final piece of our jigsaw, a way of telling stories with pictures that is truly captivating, and this same technique is one that has proved crucial to the success of every feature film made today," "That discovery was made on a continent thousands of miles from Europe on the other side of the world," "Australia," "When the first Europeans arrived here back in the 18th century, they found themselves in a severe and hostile landscape," "As the Europeans began to explore this landscape, they found something that baffled them," "In many of the caves and rock shelters, they came across strange and mysterious images," "Here in Arnhemland in the north of Australia are some of the oldest painted images found anywhere on the planet," "Recent research has shown that some of them date back over 40,000 years," "These are the world's first art galleries," "The first European settlers had a sense that these were very old images, but they hadn't a clue what they meant and not much interest in finding out." "They'd look at something like this and they'd dismiss it, childish doodle." "And for the settlers for the next 200 years these paintings remained just that, doodles," "Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, an Englishman arrived in the small community of Oenpelli in Arnhemland," "He was a biologist by training and his name was Baldwin Spencer," "During his stay in Oenpelli Spencer lived among the Aboriginal people," "Although he'd spent time with other Aboriginal communities, he found something here that he'd never seen before," "The Aboriginal people of Oenpelli were obsessed by painting," "Wherever he went, he found artists at work either painting on bits of stringy bark from the eucalyptus tree or on the cave walls," "It's the same even today," "Spencer became more and more intrigued by these paintings," "It was this curiosity that led to his breakthrough," "He noticed how Aboriginal artists were painting the same images over and over again," "The image of the barramundi fish," "The image of the earth mother Eingana," "Or the lightning man," "While watching these artists," "Spencer noticed that the images they were painting on their pieces of bark seemed strangely familiar." "Then he had his revelation." "These images were the same as those that he'd seen painted on the rocks and the hills around here and behind us now." "Those images had been painted thousands and thousands of years earlier." "This, for instance, is a group of barramundi fish painted by a modern Aboriginal artist and this is the same subject painted thousands of years before," "This is Eingana the earth mother as painted today and this is Eingana from the ancient past," "The same is true of many of the important Aboriginal images," "What this meant was that here in Arnhemland, uniquely in the world, there is a continuous artistic link from the ancient past to the present day," "Spencer realised he now had a rare opportunity," "If he could only discover the inspiration behind 20th-century Aboriginal art he could then unlock the secrets of the ancient painting in the caves and the rock shelters," "What Spencer discovered next is crucial to our quest, because when he got to talking to the Aboriginal people about their art they told him that their paintings were anything but doodles." "Their paintings were telling stories." "When you look at them it's hard to believe that these single images can tell a whole story, so how do they work?" "I met up with the most famous Aboriginal artist in the area," "Thompson Yulidjirri," "He took me to a sacred site," "So you call him up, that rainbow serpent." "As he painted an image, Thompson began to tell me the story," "Once upon a time, a little orphan boy was playing with his brother when he became hungry," "But when he found out that his favourite food, which were yams, had been eaten by his family, he began to cry," "His kindly brother called up an ancestral spirit, the rainbow serpent, and asked for his help and the family were punished for being so greedy," "Aboriginal artists don't paint a sequence of images to tell their stories," "Instead they use single stylised images to trigger in the mind of the onlooker stories they would already know," "It's these painted stories, told in a single image, that have endured for thousands of years," "so what was it that gave them the power to captivate the minds of Aboriginal people and be passed on through countless generations?" "This wouldn't be revealed to a worldwide audience until the 1960s," "It was then that a young British television presenter came with his crew to this remote region," "His name?" "David Attenborough," "I have vivid memories of squeezing through cracks and coming up and looking up and seeing the surface of the... of the crack that I'm in only a few inches from my head and suddenly being aware there were huge barramundi fish on the ceiling," "and kangaroos," "And then spirit figures, little sticklike figures that were hunting." "It was unforgettable." "David Attenborough was fascinated by the stories told through these single images," "Like Spencer, he too realised that the key to the past lay in understanding the present," "This is a sacred place, a cave sacred to the Aborigines of this part of northern Australia." "The Aborigines still paint," "From them, therefore, we may be able to get some insight into the very origins of art," "So, David Attenborough began to spend time with modern Aboriginal painters to try to understand why their stories had lasted so long," "He met an Aboriginal painter called Mugane," "I didn't know what to expect," "I used to sit with him, and he had a brush that was made by chewing the end of a little stick and he would put these marks on them and I'd watch him," "Anyway, so we got to know one another and so I was able to ask him..." "Not directly, "Why are you painting?"" "You'd say, "What name this fellow?" "What is that?"" "Tell me about this place here." "What's that?" "Dog." "And then on one painting there was this long, long rectangular shape," "I said, "What's that?"" "and Mugane leaned forward and said rather hoarsely, "Secret. "" "Why you talk so... so soft?" "If you're no good..." "If we talk hard, might be hear Mirrimi." " If we talk hard, who might hear?" " Mirrimi." "So I said, "Well, could you tell me what it was?"" "Old Mugane thought about it a bit and he said "OK, tomorrow time." "You come tomorrow time. "" "We walked for... well, I suppose about 20 minutes and there was another little encampment and inside this encampment, covered in leaves, very secret and very lonely, there was this huge pipe." "Didgeridoo, I mean like four and a half, five feet long," "This was what was represented in the painting," "Then we entered the bush where a big ceremony was going to take place in which the trumpet with the designs that it carried was an essential element." "The stories painted by Aboriginal artists had gained their power because they'd been combined with music," "They were designed to stimulate two senses, the eyes and the ears, and it was this that had made them so enduring," "The Aboriginal community at Oenpelli still perform storytelling ceremonies to this day," "Just like David Attenborough 50 years before me, I would be lucky enough to experience one," "People assembled in the morning," "Someone sang with click sticks, more men came and then they started painting themselves with totemic designs on their chests." "It was a sense of privilege and there's a holding of the breath, really, because you were in the presence of something very meaningful," "It's a highly emotionally charged moment," "As night fell, my own anticipation was rising," "The dancers were assembling beneath a rock canopy that was covered in ancient painted stories," "And then these stories began to come alive," "In the ancient past, long before the classical civilisations of the West had made their storytelling discoveries," "Aboriginal artists had found a way to captivate their audience and transport them to imaginary worlds," "To try and identify the truth of which those paintings were a part, you have to recognise that they are only a part," "They don't exist by themselves," "They are accompanied by music, by singing, by didgeridoo, by click sticks, and they are accompanied by narrative, in song, of immensely complex stories," "So the music is an integral element from all kinds of points of view and to abstract that from a piece of painting is to... .. impoverish the painting." "This, then, is the key to Aboriginal storytelling," "It's this soundtrack that's given their stories the power to survive for thousands of years and it's the same element that lifts our imaginations when we sit down to watch a film." "Images pulsing with sound." "Aboriginal storytellers understood the power of combining sound with pictures thousands of years ago," "but the rest of the world wouldn't come to exploit this technique until much, much later, long after the classical civilisations had been and gone," "It wasn't until the great religions began to realise the full potential of the soundtrack that its use began to spread across the world," "When it did, the result was explosive," "HANDEL'S "HALLELUJAH CHORUS")" "# HalleluJah!" "HalleluJah!" "# HalleluJah!" "#" "Now, religious storytellers could use the captivating power of pictures combined with music to reinforce their spiritual message," "# For the Lord Omnipotent reigneth" "# HalleluJah!" "HalleluJah!" "# HalleluJah!" "HalleluJah!" "# HalleluJah!" "#" "Then, in 1894, a new visual storytelling medium was invented," "Moving pictures," "This is the first feature film in history," "It too comes from Australia, and tells the story of the outlaw Ned Kelly," "Here is a hero, a plot and characters with emotions, but it lacks that crucial ingredient," "THEME TO "PSYCHO")" "As soon as film-makers discovered how to put sound into their films..." "THEME TO "E.T.") ... cinema really took off," "THEME TO "STAR WARS")" "Finally directors could unlock the full potential of moving pictures," "They'd found a way to move an audience so much they felt as though they'd been transported to another world," "One cannot underestimate the power of sound effects and music in modern-day filming and storytelling." "So that when you come to "Lorenzo's Oil", we have the scene where the parents, having learnt of the terrible diagnosis and prognosis of their son, make the long walk out of the doctor's office." "We enhance their demeanour, their mood, their anguish..." "BARBER'S "ADAGIO FOR STRINGS") ... by the sound of their footsteps," "By the laughter of the little girl," "And with the music," "BARBER'S "ADAGIO FOR STRINGS") - (MOTHER CLEARS HER THROAT)" "They're hiding their emotions because they don't want their son to know how they're feeling yet the music is telling us how they're feeling," "When we get home can you read a story?" "Of course, my darling." "Lorenzino, let's go home." "You know what it's like when you've watched a really good film and rather than leave the cinema you stay in your seat, almost unable to move, listening to the music and watching the end credits roll by." "Well, it's because you've been transported to another world and it's been such a powerful experience you Just can't bear for the magic to end." "BARBER'S "ADAGIO FOR STRINGS")"