Week 5B Reading Summary

The Art of Digital Storytelling: Part 1, Becoming 21^st Century StoryKeepers

            The ancient art of storytelling is being revived into an emerging mode of communication called digital storytelling.  Through the process of creating a digital story, students deepen their understanding of content while increasing visual, sound, oral language, creativity, and thinking skills.  The author’s narrative voice determines all of the multimedia decisions.  The narrative is first made as a voiceover, and then all images, sound, music, transitions, and special effects are added and organized around unfolding the story.  Digital media and digital distribution to the community allows us to develop a highly sensory experience that combines a narrative voice with images, sound, and music. 

Take Six: Elements of digital Storytelling was written to help increase the quality of student stories.  Two of the six elements are considered especially essential to good storytelling: Living in the Story and Unfolding Lessons Learned.  Digital storytelling encourages authors to write a very personal emotional connection with the story being told.  The power of storytelling is not in telling about an event, but in shifting the lens to using the setting, details and events for telling your story with the experience.  Good stories also have a point to make.  The lesson learned is a kind of moral of the story that shows the meaning of the situation in the life of the storyteller.  The lesson learned also provides depth beyond the plot of the story.  Making meaning from a story requires the author to dig deeper, and reflect on the significance of the event or situation in his or her life. 

Take Six: Elements of a Good Digital Story

            Although there are endless approaches to crafting stories depending on purpose or style, there are at least six elements that are fundamental to this style of digital storytelling.  The six elements include:

1.     Living your story - Each story is told in the first person.  Viewers are engaged in a very real and emotional experience when you share who you are, what you felt, and what the event or situation means to you.

2.     Unfolding lessons learned - One unique feature of this style of storytelling is the expectation that each story expresses how an event or situation touched your life.  This could take the form of a moral conclusion, a lesson learned, or an understanding gained.  The point of the story can be revealed implicitly with the media or explicitly with words. 

3.     Developing creative tension – A good story creates tension around a situation that is posed at the beginning of the story and resolved at the end.  The viewer is initially drawn into wondering how the story will unfold.  The tension of an unresolved situation holds the viewer’s attention to the end.

4.     Economizing the story told – A good story has a point to make, and it takes the shortest path to get there.  Each digital story is no more than three to five minutes long, and is based on a script that is no more than one page or 500 words in length. 

5.     Showing, not telling – Good stories use vivid details to reveal feelings and information rather than using words to describe them.  Unlike traditional written or oral stories, images, sounds, and music can be used to provide information and emotional meaning not provided by words.

6.     Developing craftsmanship – A good story artfully incorporates technology, demonstrating craftsmanship in communicating with images, sound, voice, color, animations, designs, transitions, and special effects.  These elements are selected to enhance the meaning of the story, not to add distracting bells and whistles.