Stories hold power—the power to move us, to educate us, to shift our perspective and spur us to action. On October 20, 2022, more than 400 members of the Yale community gathered at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, for an enlightening exploration of the many ways stories can be told and their role in shaping our understanding of the world. The gathering marked the first installment of Yale’s For Humanity Illuminated event series, showcasing the people, programs, and ideas that distinguish Yale as a world-class institution and highlight its capacity to improve and enrich lives around the globe.

The evening’s program featured five speakers approaching storytelling through their expertise in musical composition, computer animation, public health advocacy, costume design, and writing. Carlos Moreno ’70, University Trustee, kicked off the evening with introductory remarks.

Storytelling Across Disciplines

Ted Kim, professor of computer science at Yale, researches topics in physics-based simulation including fire, water, and humans. His work has appeared in over two dozen movies and received a 2012 SciTech Oscar. Previously, Kim was a senior research scientist at Pixar Research, where he received screen credits in Cars 3, Coco, Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4. His first work appeared on screen for the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Kim discussed the staggering scientific work that goes into creating realistic motion of fabrics, clothing, hair, skin, and other materials in animated movies. “We got to this point of realism because industry and university research teams all around the world have written hundreds of papers on this topic spanning decades,” Kim said. “But there’s one big problem.”

As Kim explained, when it comes to depicting realistic humans, the tools and algorithms that have been developed are specifically for depicting pale skin and straight hair.

“Out of all those hundreds of papers, all that effort, how many have been written about the physics of how shiny black skin looks? The answer is zero,” he said.

Now, Kim and the computer graphics group at Yale are working to change this by developing new algorithms that can depict kinky and afro-textured hair with CGI. “There are lots of stories out there and they’re all worth telling,” Kim said.

Marco Beltrami ’91 MusM, an Oscar-nominated composer, walked the audience through his artistic process for creating music scores for films. “The essence of what I do as a film composer is to musically reduce the story of a film to its most basic and vital components,” he said. “When working on a project, the first questions I ask myself are, what is it that makes this narrative unique and what can I do to define it?”

While scoring the zombie apocalypse movie World War Z, Beltrami decided that the essence of the film could be reduced at its subconscious level to an emergency beacon. “The two tones that comprise the beacon became the underlying harmony of the entire score and produced a feeling of anxiety that makes the storytelling more visceral,” he explained. He also used skulls of javelina pigs, a species that communicates by mashing their jaws together, to create the percussive elements of the score.

“By honing in on these details and magnifying them, the musical score can strengthen an audience’s connection to the film,” Beltrami said. “My work is rewarding not only because it’s fun but because it brings a deeper level of human communication.”

Neal Baer, an award-winning showrunner and lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, teaches his students storytelling as a method of public health advocacy. As a writer-producer on the hit television show ER, Baer wrote an episode about human papillomavirus and cervical cancer to see if storytelling could successfully inform viewers about a health issue. After the episode aired, over fifty percent of surveyed viewers said that they learned about an important topic. One out of seven said they went to see a physician.

An episode of Law & Order: SVU has also helped advance reforms to rape kit backlog policies in all fifty states. By bringing emotional narratives and empathy to data, stories can create a compelling case for change and “propel action,” noted Baer.

Toni-Leslie James, professor in the practice of costume design at David Geffen School of Drama, wowed the audience with an emotional story about her familial history, stretching from Tuscaloosa to Pittsburgh to New Haven. “My story illustrates the depth and diversity of the storytellers that make up the faculty at David Geffen School of Drama and all of the schools at Yale. I’m just one of many of those that you will find throughout our campus with deeply personal stories who have taken many and multiple journeys to arrive here,” she said.

Yahlin Chang ’94 discussed how her time as a student at Yale proved instrumental to her career as a television writer, particularly during her recent project adapting Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale into an award-winning series. “I discovered my passion for literature, and I discovered myself as a writer and a thinker,” she said. “It all started in seminars where the whole purpose was to walk in and get your mind changed.” Chang noted that debating ideas with classmates throughout her years at Yale prepared her for success in the writers’ room. “A TV show can only get better as a result of vigorous debate,” she said. 

“People tell me that when they watch [The Handmaid’s Tale], they cry, which I love because if you can cry for an actor playing a fictional character in a make belief story, then you could also find empathy for real non-fiction people going through tragedies and their real non-fiction lines,” Chang added. “Therein lies the hope for humanity, which is above all the amazing human capacity for empathy.”

The Story of Yale’s Future

President Peter Salovey ’86 PhD took the stage to discuss his own reverence for the power of storytelling. 

“All around us we see complex global challenges that make the effective deployment of narratives more necessary than ever before,” he said. “As I consider the extraordinary efforts of those at Yale who are increasing knowledge and using storytelling to understand and address pressing challenges, I’m optimistic about our shared future.”

Watch the Full Program