Perhaps a strange question to be asking after all these years of Digital Storytelling, but there are still many who don’t know and many more who think they know but don’t.

It’s also true that there are any number of definitions of digital storytelling and what I understand by the term is a million miles from the way Disney might use it.

So at the end of the Culture Shock project when the organisers, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, called a conference to inspire others in their sector, I was asked to answer the question, “What is Digital Storytelling?”

All the presentations were recorded and the videos are appearing on YouTube. Here’s mine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9J4clV6hJI

You can watch other presentations on the TWAMDigitalStories YouTube Channel

Gareth Morlais

I appear in two new features this week. At DS6 Gareth Morlais recorded an interview with me about the potential of digital storytelling on the iPad. He makes some very generous comments about me during this feature, but I hope you find the content about creating digital stories useful. It is the first of his new monthly podcasts on the Aberth Digital Storytelling blog

At about the same time Angelina Koh and Aurelia Castro from Digital Storytelling Asia were in the UK and quickly filmed me answering questions about digital storytelling. It was great fun hosting them here in York and taking them to DS6 where Angelina gave the keynote address.

It’s not too late to book a place at the Culture Shock! Conference in Newcastle. This day conference is for anyone who’s interested in digital Storytelling and especially people from the Museums, Libraries and Archives sector.

Culture Shock is one of the UKs most successful digital storytelling projects and as it draws to a close the team want to share the best of their experience and expertise.

I will be there as will Pip Hardy from Patient Voices – the full programme is available to download including a booking form.

I always find events like DS6 stimulating and exciting. There are lots of good things about being your own boss, but one thing I miss about my former workplace is the interaction with other people doing a similar job. So festivals, conferences and events are the places where I am inspired and invigorated. Ideas flow, new contacts are made and I am challenged to take a fresh look at how I work.

I have been showing people how to use iMovie on the iPad 2 to create digital stories as well as demonstrating how useful iMovie ’11 on the Mac has become. Lots of interest today in the service I offer and particularly the manuals I give to participants in the Training Trainers workshops. I promise now I will do some more work and make them available for download – for a small fee of course – as my own boss I have to generate my own income too.

So as the organised part of the day at this digital storytelling festival draws to a close I’m looking forward to my last evening in Aberystwyth with Angeline and Aurelia before I return to York and they head home for Singapore via London. I just hope the restaurant I found last year is still open for business.

For those of you who meant to make the time to be at DS6 – don’t miss out next year. Start planning now!

Esko Reinikainen posted this on the DS Cymru website. Put it in your diary now and plan to join us at the only Digital Storytelling Festival in the UK.

I am happy to announce that the DS6 International Digital Storytelling Festival will take place on:

Friday 17th June, 2011

at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales

We are still looking for your suggestions for our speaker and breakout sessions long list, the deadline for submissions is Monday 14th February.  You can do so using the form on the main page of http://digstocymru.ning.com or the direct link to the form which is http://goo.gl/aBelk

As ever, we need all the help you can give, so if you are interested in volunteering your time and skills, either in the run up to the event, or on the day itself, please get in touch with me via the network e-mail or eskoreinikainen at gmail.com expressing how much time and what skills you can offer.

We are particularly interested in anyone who wants to help with the sponsorship team and as community managers for our online channels.

So that’s the news, please help it spread far and wide by setting your phasers to retweet, like, digg, or whatever link love juice you’re on!

All best,

Esko Reinikainen

DS Cymru

I’ve just received this good news from Esko Reinikainen
about DS6:-

Digital Storytelling Cymru Network Promoting Digital
Storytelling in Wales and beyond… A message to all members of
Digital Storytelling Cymru Network Digital Storytellers!

It’s a new year, and that means time to get rolling with DS6 International
Digital Storytelling Festival! We’ve just opened the call for
speakers, and we would really like our amazing Digital Storytelling
diaspora who have been scouring the globe for interesting stories
to nominate those enlightened people they have come across during
the course of the year as our keynote speakers and breakout session
leaders. I’ve put a nomination form on the DS Cymru network’s main
page, so all you have to do is check in and let us know your
suggestions by filling the form in. But that is not all! The
quality and range of submissions will be dependent on how well the
network amplifies the message that the call is open. So please,
wherever you live online or offline, please spread the word!

For your sharing convenience, here is the link to the nomination form:
http://goo.gl/aBelk We are also looking for volunteers who would be
willing to get more involved with the grunt work of organising and
running the festival. If that sounds like you, please send me an
message via the in-network email system explaining what skills and
how much time you can offer. All help will be on an unpaid
voluntary basis, but you get to work and hang out with some very
cool people! I’m looking forward to all your speaker suggestions
and an amazing DS6 this summer! Esko Reinikainen DS Cymru Visit
Digital Storytelling Cymru Network at:
http://digstocymru.ning.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network To control
which emails you receive on Digital Storytelling Cymru Network,
click here

I’ve spent the last two days upgrading my MacBooks to Snow Leopard and iLife ’11. It’s the only logical step but it’s one I have been reluctant to take. I’ve been running digital storytelling workshops using iMovie HD since 2005 and it has always served my participants well until Apple stopped shipping computers with iMovie HD installed. I knew I would have to change at some point and if you read some of my previous blog posts you will know that I considered upgrading several times. The release of iLife ’11 with iMovie ’11 (or 9) I tried again to press the software into service for creating digital stories. This time it was a success.

All my MacBooks were running OSX Leopard 10.5.8 but iLife ’11 needs OSX Snow Leopard 10.6, which won’t run iMovieHD. So as I upgraded them I left the old ways behind. At the same time I have rewritten the tutor training manual I give to workshop participants (it takes a long time to upgrade 6 MacBooks – almost 2 days).

The rewrite meant building a couple of digital stories from scratch and grabbing screen shots to illustrate each step of the process. As I did it I realised how much simpler some things are in iMovie ’11. Cropping, Ken Burns Effect, Precision Editing, Transitions are all simpler to create. It’s also easier to make adjustments later in the process, no matter how many effects have been applied. Replacing one image with another is very simple. Lengthening a zoom is simple, even with transitions in place. You can listen to the sound track whilst editing clips too. Many of the limitations I’d just grown used to in the old version of iMovie have been swept away.

The real test will come next week when I deliver my first training trainers workshop since the upgrade. What will my participants think? With nothing to compare the experience with I assume they’ll be as happy as all the others – so long as my workflow makes sense and they all go away with their stories burned to DVD.

Building "Affected for Life?" in iMove '11

I will be delivering my next workshop using the latest version of iMovie. Despite several incarnantions of the new iMovie it was never suited to processing still images with precision. This made the creation of digital stories more an exercise in trial and error in equal quantities.

Last month iLife ’11 hit the streets. It brought a timeline to the video editor for the first time since iMovie HD and so I felt it looked promising. A number of bugs in the processing of still images have also been removed and I began to feel confident that it would work for my purposes. The  first test of a new piece of video editing software is to build my digital story Affected for Life? This is the one I use in every workshop as a tutorial. After the first build I was partly convinced and hoped that the problems I still faced were caused by being unfamiliar with the interface and menus.

I was driven on because iMovie HD is no longer available and even if you can pick up a copy it doesn’t work under Snow Leopard. Even in Leopard you have to regress Quicktime to an older version to process still images properly, and stills are the bread and butter of digital stories. So anyone with new Mac would be finding my tutorials of little use except to learn the principles of digital storytelling. So it was with great relief and some excitement that I successfully created a workflow in iMovie ’11!

So having built Affected for Life? as a new tutorial digistory I have begun to rewrite the iMovie section of my tutorial manuals for my next training workshop in a couple of week’s time.

One disappointment about the timeline in iMovie ’11 is that the audio isn’t displayed until images are added, so I have created a template with a series of placeholder images. When the audio track is dragged into the timeline the sound waveform is displayed beneath them. I feel it’s easier for newcomers to digital storytelling to be able to see the beginning and end of their audio and to observe the progress of building the images in the timeline. The place holder images simply move down the line as new pictures are added. Once the last image is inserted the placeholders can be deleted.

I am quite excited by the potential of some of the new features in iMove ’11. Picture in Picture and Side by Side pictures have a lot of potential. The Precision editor is also excellent for trimming the start and end of clips and for adjusting transitions. The Ken Burns Effect is also easier to set up – although it doesn’t have the nice ‘s-curve’ motion of iMovie HD.

I now feel that iMovie ’11 is a worthy successor to iMovie HD. I’m sure there will be issues but as with any piece of basic software I’ll have to find a way of working around the shortcomings. That’s part of the fun – once you’ve overcome the apprehension about making it work properly for at least 80% of what you need. Only now do I feel I have I arrived at that point.

I’m excited and doubtful about the arrival of Adobe Premiere Elements for Mac. Excited because it this could be a Mac solution for digital storytelling but dubious because it’s Adobe and my experience of their products and pricing is mixed.

My digital storytelling journey began with Adobe Premiere on a Mac. At that time (2002) the video editing package cost something like 650 GBP. So the arrival of a lite version for 100 USD looks like a bargain. But the UK price will probably be much higher than the exchange rate would suggest and Adobe’s upgrade policy is usually quite expensive, so keeping up to date could be like a subscription plan.

Of course I’m saying all this without having tried out the new product. The announcement doesn’t appear to be matched with a retail version on the Adobe Website. But I will probably give it a spin when it’s released into the wild.

The need for a Mac solution for digital storytelling is driven by the demise of iMovie HD, and as subsequent OSX upgrades come along it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep the old version from 2006 alive. Since the rewrite of iMovie in versions 7 and 8 (in iLife ’08 and ’09), it’s not been easy to devise a workflow for digital storytelling. But you never know – the arrival of iLife 11, whenever that might be, could deliver the functions we need.

CREATE – SHARE – LISTEN | 4th International Conference on Digital Storytelling

There is a host of excellent speakers at this event – and if you are willing to brave a Norwegian winter then now is the time to book. There’s a 500 NOK (£52) early bird discount if you book before the 1st of December.  Here’s the summary from the front page of the website:

The content will include presentations, theoretical reflections, case stories, workshops and great experiences. Meet world renowned speakers and be inspired. We explore the increasing diversity in the use of Digital Storytelling and seek to contribute to knowledge and understanding of the potential of digital storytelling in a variety of contexts. These cover educational purposes and health, leisure, recreation, activism, community building, planning, professional communication and reflection.

Contributions should aim at building knowledge about digital storytelling as a genre and its ambitions and potentials in society. We therefore welcome critical and well founded presentations of applications in various contexts, methods and expressions used and in what directions future developments might go.

I haven’t been to the International Conference since the first one in Cardiff in 2003 so I think it’s time to show my face next year. See you there? I hope so.