Collaboration · 03
SPEAKING & WORKSHOPS
Dramatic structure, history and language models
Talks, seminars and workshops for schools and young people, universities, festivals, cultural organisations and companies — built around one question: what becomes visible when history, or a single life, is read as a story with a shape?
Especially for young people
Your own story has turning points too
Before becoming a filmmaker, Daniel Paavola trained in youth work and spent ten years working with young people and in child welfare. Working with young people is still what he enjoys most. For schools, youth work and student groups, the workshops start from the participants’ own lives: how every story has a beginning, a crisis and a turning point — and how the same shape can be found in history. Along the way, participants learn to use a language model as a thinking partner, not an answer machine.
Possible topics
- History on a Story Arc — reading five thousand years of history as one dramatic movement.
- The model as research partner — how a filmmaker works with language models as collaborators, and where their limits lie.
- Recognition and reversal — Aristotle’s dramatic terms as tools for understanding turning points, personal and historical.
- Paul’s Letter to the Romans as drama — an ancient text read through the logic of plot.
Formats
- Talk — 45–60 minutes, with excerpts from the films.
- Seminar — a longer session with discussion, for courses and study groups.
- Youth workshop — for schools, youth centres and student groups: participants map their own turning points onto a dramatic arc and try a language model as a creative, critical partner.
- Workshop — hands-on: participants map their own story, or their organisation’s history, onto a dramatic arc, with and without a language model.
- Screening and conversation — a film followed by a discussion with the director.
In Finnish or English, in Finland or online. Every format can be adapted to the audience.