Home Page Subscribe Unsubscribe Industry Jobs Company Profiles Events Research & Papers Glossary Writers Contact Us

Event: Review The Fifth Annual Digital Storytelling Festival September 16-18, 1999 ITVT Issue 2.34 10/1/99 (Article best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer for accurate formatting.) What's Your Story? By Hilary McLellan, McLellan Wyatt Digital (http://tech-head.com/mwd.htm) The Fifth Annual Digital Storytelling Festival entitled "What's Your Story?" was held in Crested Butte, Colorado, high in the Rocky Mountains recently (September 16-18, 1999). At the event, attendees enjoyed blue skies...tall mountains...tall tales! Digital storytelling is the art and craft of exploring different media and software applications to communicate ideas or narrative in new and powerful ways. A few examples of digital storytelling include oral performances supported by media presentations with Adobe Premiere and Macromedia Director; stand-alone presentations created with software packages such as Adobe Premiere, Real SlideShow, and other tools; interactive gaming, Web-based applications, hypertext, digital effects in movies, corporate storytelling, and interactive television. The Festival brought out important themes about how to, for instance: develop new forms of narrative to take advantage of the capabilities of digital media; adapt design to take advantage of a new relationship between audience and content provider; link computers with the Web and television; train professionals to work with digital storytelling techniques; explore storytelling as a way to instruct and communicate to visitors and virtual communities through push-pull technologies, customization, and user profiles. Specific speakers presented projects of interest such as Carolyn May, the enhanced TV producer for the PBS-funded, Ken Burns' Frank Lloyd Wright documentary. On this project, May produced a special post-broadcast enhanced TV presentation which downloaded to viewers computers after the show was over. May discussed how she explored convergence storytelling by integrating video materials from the Burns' documentary with new multimedia and Internet elements. In some ways, her ITV project was a CD-ROM like presentation, but shown on television. Several speakers discussed how storytelling can be applied to marketing efforts. Reid Kemp, VP of Marketing at the Bermuda-based insurance company X.L. Capital Ltd, for exmaple, demonstrated how his company uses what he calls "distributed storytelling" to enable better communication. For example, Kemp talked about how storytelling resources are accessible company-wide via an elaborate knowledge capture/management system to company's agents and executives. According to Reid, there are two types of storytelling: individual and corporate. The characteristics of individual storytelling include: passion, immediacy, tension, resolution, emotion, and spirituality. "Individual storytelling is more intense than corporate storytelling", said Kemp. "Corporate storytelling is group storytelling. Who is the company? What is the company all about?" Kemp went on to observe that emotion and spirituality are difficult to express in a corporate setting. Melissa Joulwan, senior creative director for Organic Online Inc., on the other hand, discussed how stories, in the form of scenarios based upon market research, can communicate to clients what design strategies will best attract their target audiences. Joulwan explained that Organic Online uses stories to develop "appropriately branded experiences." Three strategies are used: 1) user profiles; 2) conceptual models; and, 3) user scenarios. With user profiles, Organic Online presents fictional characters based on research from the client or deriven from the internal strategic services group. With these conceptual models, a theme is identified based on the business objectives and the needs and desires of the largest audience. This type of storytelling serves as a guide for Web site development within a creative framework and helps the client focus on the most important goals. User scenarios, on the other hand, can powerfully explore the use of plot. Ultimately, these scenarios present stories about how members of the target audience might navigate the existing site and how they might navigate a site with the proposed design features. A fascinating example was presented of a sample family (mother, father, and teenage son) as they interacted with the Blockbuster Video Web site. Still, other presenters talked about and/or demonstrated new tools and Web resources to tell one's own stories. These included RealNetworks' new tool Real SlideShow (http://www.real.com/products/tools/slideshowplus/index.html) and a related tool created by the Trellix Corporation (http://www.trellix.com/). HearthStory.com, a soon-to-be launched Web site, will feature family history sites and provide a forum for people to share stories and photographs with other family members. The Digital Clubhouse (http://www.storycenter.org/clubhouse.html), a nonprofit organization with locations in Sunnyvale, California and New York City, allows people to tell their stories via digital media. A major trend at the festival seemed to be the emergence of Web sites designed to provide people with a forum for sharing their stories. This includes a Web site for waitresses, a Web site for New York cab drivers, Web sites for teens, and a Web site featuring stories and testimonials about those who died in the Vietnam War (http://www.thevirtualwall.com), providing an eloquent digital complement to the physical memorial in Washington, D.C. Related to this are the personal Web sites and electronic journals on the Web, a new form of expression that also connects authors to others throughout the world. Three Apple Masters (http://www.apple.com/applemasters/home.html) were featured speakers at the festival such as photographer Howard Bingham, author and interactive game designer Douglas Adams, and digital storyteller Dana Atchley, founder of the Digital Storytelling Festival. The Apple Masters program recognizes creative people whose work features Apple computers. All three of these presenters made compelling presentations. Douglas Adams, "Chief Fantasist" at Digital Village (http://www.tdv.com/), the makers of the game "Starship Titanic," has been experimenting with interactive fiction and computer games. He discussed issues involved in designing interactive media focusing on how technology has caught up with, or failed to catch up with, human communication. According to Adams, "The word interactivity is misleading. It's a buzzword. The technology of our communications has failed to catch up with our non-technological communications." Human communication provides a critical model for interactivity. "When you're talking to one other person, you'll talk about whatever is of mutual interest. There's no way you'll talk about something that doesn't interest either of you. But when everyone's talking - like at a dinner party - you're following the topic and talking to whoever said the most interesting, controversial, or recent thing." With one-to-one communications, the topic based on the partners. with many-to-many communications, the choice of partners is based on topic. Adams identified conversation as an ideal model for interactivity. He suggested that this is "both incredibly hard and very easy." He mentioned the Eliza program, an extremely compelling application where the program played the role of a psychiatrist - reframing input from the user as questions. When Eliza loses the thread of the conversation, it "realizes" this and starts a new line of conversation. As Adams pointed out, Eliza successfully models a highly paid professional based upon only 12 lines of code! The electronic version of Adams' "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" tries to create interactivity by means of virtual conversations. Related to this, Adams suggested that interactivity is really a natural form for stories. As an example, he pointed out that when a child listens to a bedtime story, the child is full of questions. "Anyone who has a 5-year-old child that you read to at night knows what interactive storytelling is about." Adams also emphasized the importance of limitations. "You have to understand the grain of the medium you're working in. Be aware of the limitations of the medium. Use those limitations to your advantage. Make the most of your limitations while you still have them. When you have unlimited resources and power, you don't have to think too much. Solve a problem some other way than throwing money and resources at it." As an example of the importance of constraints, he pointed to the original Star Wars movies, by comparison with Phantom Menace, where technical constraints were significantly eliminated. The original Star Wars movies hold up better, in large part because of technical limitations. Adams also pointed out an example from one of the Indiana Jones movies. Harrison Ford caught the flu and couldn't play a scene that featured lots of extras. As the cost of keeping the extras became unsupportable, Steven Speilberg and George Lucas met in Ford's trailer. Ford suggested shooting a gun rather than the sword fight that was planned. According to Adams, this is the best scene in the movie --- all thanks to overcoming constraints with ingenuity and creativity. And in the computer game Myst, the designers, the Miller brothers, successfully used a limitation --- the slowness of the medium --- to convey an evocative sense of mysteriousness. Adams discussed the value of collaborative authoring in the context of one of his current projects, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 2 (http://www.h2g2.com/), an online guide to the galaxy that users can annotate - a collaborative guidebook - that supplements and enriches the original book. According to Adams, "When you remove time delays, something happens. The feedback loop is instantaneous. And when users of a guidebook or resource can add their own information, the whole becomes richer." Adams explained that he has learned a great deal from the input of people on this Web site. And with interactive media, unlike print books, it's possible to add rewrites and improve upon the original product. Dana Atchley's presentation of stories from Next Exit, using the theme of storytelling around a campfire, was the grand finale and the high point of the show. Atchley included a digital campfire on a small television screen, surrounded by real logs, together with a large screen projection of images, stories, and family photos and movies that he wove into a moving tapestry of life stories, combining the power of digital media with the immediacy of oral storytelling. Complementing the festival itself was a Digital Storytelling Bootcamp, a 3 day workshop taught by Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen who direct the Digital Storytelling Center (http://www.storycenter.org/) in San Francisco as well as teaching classes in digital storytelling at the University of California at Berkeley. This Bootcamp is so popular that a second session was added this year. Every participant creates a brief digital story, in the process learning to use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere as well as the essential elements of digital storytelling, including point of view, emotional content, pacing, and economy. The festival Web site at http://www.dstory.com features information about the presenters as well as digital storytelling. Copyright 1998 - 2004 [ITVT] | Swedlow. All rights reserved