Digital Storytelling

     I’m always a little leery of the barrage of end of the year shows and columns. I’m hesitant to join the cacophony myself, but it is a natural time to reflect and look ahead.
     I hope that I have begun to show the wonderful variety of styles and tools available to help students tell their stories: video tape, still pictures, stop action animation, etc. PhotoStory is indeed a great entry point for PC users and Meg Ormiston and Dave Jakes added a couple more tips in the comments of my December 1st post. Meg points out that you can import a PhotoStory project into MovieMaker and Dave offers a PDF and screencast tutorial of a “priceless” story he crafted.
     I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the passing of a great storyteller, Robert Altman. Coincidentally, my wife and I just rented his last movie, “Prairie Home Companion,” written by Garrison Keillor, based on his show and storytelling style. These two were a natural combination and as much as I’ve always enjoyed their work, their rambling, loose end stories are just the thing you want to help your students AVOID. Altman and Keillor have a tremendous amount of time and great talent on both sides of the camera and microphone to help unfold their stories. Unless you have a semester or two to devote to a single project, keep it short and focused. (Though Keillor’s "commercials" are almost always great little stories all by themselves!)

Looking Ahead
     “Empowering Students and Teachers” is one of the themes of AFI’s (American Film Institute) “Lights, Camera, Education!” program which is available through unitedstreaming along with an 86 page guide that also includes rubrics, storyboard templates and permission forms. The DEN’s first webinar of ‘07 on Wednesday afternoon, January 24th will feature an AFI associate director and focus on this great program. You can give yourself a preview at my November 15th post and download the DEN podcast introducing the program from there.
     Here’s to a great 2007, learning and sharing through digital storytelling in all its forms!

Clip art from Discovery Education. "happy new year!."
unitedstreaming: http://www.unitedstreaming.com/

      With the Frames program that is ($44.95). A friend who works for Tech4Learning gave me a copy of the latest version at a conference last month and playing around with it reminds me what a powerful storytelling tool stop action animation can be. It was one of the original special effects in Hollywood after all! I’ve seen a number of entries in media festivals that use their Clay Animation kit figures or Legos or photos or drawings to tell a story. And, yes, you can string those images together in a variety of programs from PowerPoint to Final Cut or Adobe Premiere. Frames, however, puts it all at your fingertips including recording and green screen capability for still images, an "onion skin" feature that lets you line up a picture with the last one, and exporting to a variety of formats from web or podcast ready to importing into your video editing program.
     Though not made with Frames, here are a couple of PSA’s (public service announcements) from the San Fernando Education Technology Team that use stop action: “Buckle Up!” and “Parents” (which really just speeds video up for a time lapse effect). Aside from creating a virtual set with stop action animated actors, time lapse style movies can reveal changes that students have a tough time visualizing. Growing plants from seed in class or measuring evaporation in a glass container? Take a picture every day from the exact same place, put them together in a video editing program and add a cross dissolve-like transition between each shot. Thirty, one second pictures could show a month in just half a minute.
     For years I’ve kidded the Tech4Learning people that they give away as much as they sell and I’m not talking about their software. They are a tremendous resource for copyright friendly pictures with Pics4Learning; free software tutorials from their own products to hints on

Microsoft and Apple programs, as well as unitedstreaming (Snacks are free, Recipes4Success is a subscription service); and some tools like a rubric maker and a graphic organizer maker.

      This was just going to be a simple review of a very powerful program for adding the “Ken Burns” effect or panning and zooming around a picture. PhotoToMovie ($49.95 for both PC’s and Mac) is such a powerful program for doing that, that people have been able to make commercials and DVD’s with it. And since the sight of our brand new granddaughter in the arms of her three great-grandmothers has made me unusually sentimental and intro- and retrospective these days, I thought I could just fly around an old copy of a photo of me in my great-grandmother’s arms to create that same feeling for others. You can see from the picture (click to enlarge) how easy it is to identify an area, set the timing, define the path, and move/zoom to the next point of interest. Easy enough to do for a quick blog post: here’s me in my christening gown, up to dad, over and around to grandma Brennan, and back to the lady who’s holding me, “Congratulations, Mrs. O’Brien, I just made you a great-grandmother for the last few years of your life!” One picture, one program, one post…what should I blog about next? But that approach does neither PhotoToMovie nor any of my great-grandparents justice.
     Now might be a good time to watch the version of the short video I did make with PhotoToMovie before I pick the program and the storytelling process apart.
     “Opportunity”  Download DEN4genOpp.mov

     All I had to do was run my original version once to realize that the story in that picture wasn’t about my birth making a four generation photo op, but rather about the opportunities that all eight of my great-grandparents created for generations to come with their brave exodus to “Americay.” So, here is a little on what I refer to as the “classic” digital storytelling process (as opposed to my usual “Makin’ Movies” slant).
     -The writing comes first, then find some pictures to emphasize the words. In this case, the words were inspired by the picture or what lead up to that moment and has come to be since. In general, to get a good three minute video, write three pages, boil it down to five hundred words or half a page, then pace it with some good images and appropriate (soft) music. One long sentence did it for this video and if I waited to find just the right music (copyright clear, of course), my brand new granddaughter would probably be walking and talking, so no music this time. The video is also just a bit long, but I did kind of want to wallow in PhotoToMovie’s ability to move around a picture. Good digital stories should be tight and spend just enough time on images and words to make a point and then briskly move on. My timing here leans toward the melodramatic.
     -Black with no picture accentuates the words and heightens anticipation for the image to come or gives you time to ponder the image you just saw. I used it at the beginning and the end to do both and give some symmetry.
     I slipped in a picture of dad’s other grandmother at a younger age to put a “face” on the part about their immigration and balance my older picture on the other side of the four generations photo. I hope the black and white photos dissolving into color speak for themselves as the past, present and the future.
     You can see from the screenshot that there is a very familiar timeline to work with and the ability to add sound and some transitions. Consider a copy or two of PhotoToMovie for your media centers to let students really get into making still pictures a moving experience. The exported clip can easily be incorporated into any of your video editing programs to get the best of both worlds. I imported this PhotoToMovie project into iMovie so that I could time the words to the pictures better.

Let’s all welcome Hall Davidson and his Media Matters blog to the DEN blogoshere. I’m sure it will be a great place to learn, share and have some fun. And speaking of fun, you should go right over there to see what this familiar lookiing elf is all about.

     Using a scanner to digitize primary sources like photographs, documents and original artwork for your stories is the rock solid foundation of digital storytelling. But choosing and using a scanner can be a challenge. My own research this week, visiting local stores and poking around on the internet, turned up incredible combinations of scanner/printer/copier/fax/microwave oven devices. OK, maybe not microwave ovens, but you see how closely related scanning technology is to the others. I’m going to avoid discussing these multifunction machines (though I did help three friends set them up with their new systems this fall) and concentrate on the basics.
     You can get a very nice USB scanner for about $49. You may still have parallel and SCSI scanners around in your school and they should work just fine as long as there is a computer port to connect them to. I am going to sidestep the various software that is included with scanners and sold separately, possibly even downloadable from the manufacturers’ websites, and just generically discuss the process of getting a real tangible piece of paper into the 0’s and 1’s that your storytelling program of choice can manipulate and display. I will say that once your scanner’s drivers are loaded and recognized, programs like PhotoShop and FireWorks will let you scan with them. I will also take this opportunity to endorse a shareware program that seems to be the Swiss Army knife of getting the most out of any brand of scanner (especially older ones) on both Macs and PC’s: VueScan is $49.95 for the basic version. And Ed Hamrick is probably the international poster boy of support and updates.
     As far as bells and whistles go, I urge you to consider having at least one film scanner or photo scanner that can specifically handle slides and negatives. A lot of my wife’s family pictures are slides so I invested in both a film scanner and later a photo scanner with slide/film capability to let me archive those images from the middle of the last century. The film scanner also came in very handy when we did storytelling workshops with senior citizens in my former district.
     I talked a bit about picture formats (“A Picture by any other Name”) and the advantages of scanning at a higher dpi (dots per inch) when you are going to use the “Ken Burns” effect to move around a photograph (“Pixel Perfect”). You can get an idea of the quality this gives you by comparing these three versions of this same 3×4 inch photograph. Though the ruler size is exactly the same, the larger dpi versions will spread their pixels wider and wider on your computer screen depending on what your resolution is set to. That’s me in my great-grandmother’s lap: four generations of O’Briens! I’m going to “Ken Burns” this photo and make a quick story from it in the next couple of days in order to highlight yet another program. In the meantime consider the size and quality of these pictures. The first was scanned at 72 dpi is 287×213 pixels and takes up 60 kb. The second was scanned at 150 dpi is 597×444 pixels and takes up 259 kb. Finally, I scanned the highest quality picture at 300 dpi and it weighs in at 1194×888 and 1 mb. This last one just about fills my laptop monitor that is set to  a resolution of 1440×852. If your monitor is set to a more conventional 800×600 or 1024×768, you will have to scroll around to see the whole picture.

     P.S. I forgot to mention that you should save your scanned images in an uncompressed format such as BMP, PICT or TIFF for the best quality.

     We’ve been having a little discussion over in the discussion boards about students creating their own magazine covers as a way to express their personalities and tell their story. Along those lines, how about making a comic book or graphic novel? But this program is just for Macintosh users (some free and PC ideas at the end, though)- ComicLife from plasq comes bundled with the Intel Macs or is $24.95 ($29.95 for the deluxe version which adds lots of fonts and templates). They advertise that there is no learning curve and I have to agree (especially for students!) Everything is pretty up front on the creation page: page templates, fonts, speech balloons, importing pictures…. Export options are also straight forward. I like that you can save your book as a QuickTime movie that moves from page to page as you hit “play.”
     You can approximate this on your own by making your comic frames in any number of programs. PowerPoint and Kid Pix let you save your slides out as pictures. They can then be imported into a Word document for instance (make sure you set “float over text”) and arranged comic book style. The Draw document in AppleWorks also lets you create separate boxes to fill with text and pictures. Opaque ovals can then be added as speech balloons. A bit more work than ComicLife, but free for those with programs that allow the flexibility of placing text and pictures.
     And now back to those magazine covers. In your program of choice, import an image that’s big enough to fill the page. Now make a title or some headlines in a contrasting color (good use of WordArt) to place on that image. Add smaller pictures and more text boxes as teasers for the stories within. We did something similar to this in the library of my former school to celebrate National Library Week. There have been magazine covers, wanted posters, “Read” posters, trading cards… Let your imagination run wild!

     Here’s another program that’s right under your nose (if you are a PC with XP user). To get it, all you’ll have to do is visit Microsoft’s site to download your free copy (remember, XP required!). Yes, there are a number of things that it doesn’t do, chiefly not video. But it is PhotoStory after all! What it does do is to let you simply and pretty elegantly bring still pictures to life, add your and/or someone else’s voice and generate your own music track. Not bad for free! We’ve used it a couple of times in my former school district for senior citizen workshops. It really let those folks concentrate on their stories and not have to give a thought to the technology. Check out Niles Twp. High Schools’ digitalstories.org for their work. They are all worth a look, but I have to point out “We Can’t Toot His Horn” as a fine example of the “classic” digital storytelling style and “Special Day on the other Side of the World” as well, especially for its historical timing. Was this little girl the first American born in Saigon before our involvement in rebuilding turned into a war? And while you’re there, take a look at the "Presentation" link on the main page. You’ll find the workshop handouts, a tutorial, storyboard templates, and a PowerPoint about connecting senior citizens to our schools.
     Writing is the hard part. Once you’ve got a good, tight story, it’s just a matter of lining up your pictures, setting any panning or zooming in and out, recording the voice(s), and asking the program to create some background music. You can also add text and titles to each or import PowerPoint slides or graphics slides from other programs. My buddy David Jakes has also put together a nice tutorial on the program along with many, many other great resources and even has some colored backgrounds you can download and import for your titles. You’ll have to scroll down to just about the bottom of the page for the tutorial in PDF.
     Just a bit of a catch on sharing PhotoStories, though. None of the export options seem to play on a Mac. And since I’m still getting the hang of running PC applications on my Mac laptop, I have a few questions for you veteran PC storytellers. Is there a way to bring your zooming/panning pictures into MovieMaker? And can you also import the music sound tracks that you create in PhotoStory?