From personal digital storytelling to mass media: how can we use mulitmedia?
Storytime is changing. Will it descend into silliness? Monty Python Storytime on YouTube from pipes90.
Your girlfriend’s shoe collection, an old man’s prized teddy bear, a lady’s wrinkles and a nightclub stairwell: these are gems of digital storytelling.
This new way of telling stories allows individuals to present their experiences – and even communicate them - like never before. The multimedia platform provides a form for this, allowing for new perspectives and creating “multi-media sonnets from the people” as Daniel Meadows says.
Daniel Meadows initiated Capture Wales, a digital storytelling project in conjunction with the BBC. This aimed to train people from all over Wales to present a two-minute digital story with only 250 words and a few pictures. He was inspired by the Center for Digital Storytelling in California. More than simply presenting a story, Daniel Meadows believes that this has the potential “to change the way we engage in our communities”.
This multimedia craze is cropping up all over the place. Even here in Cardiff, the Cardiff Web Scene and Nocci have joined together to present Ignite, which asks: “If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only had 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?” It is aimed to answer non-personal questions like “How to produce a low-budget horror movie” in a five-minute presentation.
These presentations use an “Ignite PowerPoint template”, which, like Capture Wales, provide a forms to allow people to construct their own stories and communicate them to other people.
Mulitmedia experiences allow people to communicate in so many new ways. But how does this differ when newspapers and magazines try to use multimedia as a means of storytelling?
The BBC have launched a multimedia experience to track a shipping container, The Box, and tell the story of globalisation and world trade. Yet, when I clicked on the link to track ‘The Box’ on a timeline, it didn’t work, didn’t show up and didn’t tell me any story about globalisation. Instead, it seems the BBC is manipulating news and making up stories in order to show off its multimedia skills rather than use multimedia platforms to tell the story more effectively.
More importantly, the BBC is still restrictive about how interactive their multimedia experience is. Readers can send in their pictures and keep tabs on the box via the updated articles but how else are readers involved? Would the story not have been improved by the audience being able to add their own stories about ‘The Box’? An issue was also raised by Paul Canning concerning the inability for the interactive map to be embedded into other pages.
For all the ideas and potential understanding that could be generated by the story of a shipping container, I’m sceptical about any readers actually taking time to track a box round the world when the multimedia experience fails to fully engage with the social media potential. There are more opportunities to be made of such multimedia focussed stories.
From personal digital stories to the BBC’s Box, there is more to be made of multimedia in large media organisations by combining the two. Large media organisations can expand by allowing its audience to add their own personal experience via multimedia publishing tools.
This allows the audience to have more control over how they connect with the story by directly influencing how the story is told. Indeed, “different parts of a story are told using different media” and even by different people. It’s not only important to remember to choose the best platform for the story, but perhaps also, to remember how to utilise the ‘community’ in multimedia presentations.
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1 Comment
October 31, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I agree, tools for the job and who we bring in as part of our broader team is one of the key issues.
Digital narratives allow us to add depth, just read Julia McWatt’s post where she suggests liberating the photo archives of newspapers and using them in the process – we could take that even further by developing mapping tools and plot them on.
The Box is an interesting project, which points to some interesting things – but it is too early to say how effective this sort of package could be.
And is the question how to utilise the community, or how to be part of the community so we can work together to tell stories?