Week 5 Lecture and Tutorial (Sharayah)

Digital Storytelling

In the lecture and tutorial, the focus was about digital storytelling. There are various ways of telling a story using multimodal text production and in relation to assignment 3, the emphasis was on narratives with digital story telling. 

In the lecture,  the first example shown was 'Miniscule' which was about snails and their trek to make it to the slippery dip. they got the idea from the children playing during the day and so they continually went down the slippery dip all night. This production had no speaking and only used sound effects. This shows how a narrative can have no dialogue yet still have an effective way of showing a simple story. 

'Tropfest' is a website which people create a digital story and the example looked at in the lecture is 'Photobooth'. This was located in a war zone where it is desolate, isolated and dark. The use of grey scale gives it a sense of mystery and caution. There are three characters (soldiers) with a predominant leader as he is the one leading the way. The tragedy in the end is one of the soldiers dying because he was not in the picture with his family in the photobooth. This digital story follows the narrative structure with the resolution dying. Not all narratives have to have a positive resolution. There are themes of the colour red with it appearing on a car, the photobooth and the blood at the end. 

'The Afghan Girl' is a photo taken by the National Geographic. The photo draws a viewer in with her timid and scared look in her bold, blue eyes. This picture represents digital story telling because a viewer can make many judgements about her just by looking at different aspects of the picture. For example, her clothing, she is dirty, her expression, the year the photo was taken (can see what was going on in the country at the time), her ethnicity and other aspects. 

In the tutorial, we looked at these examples during the lecture and discussed different aspects of each. Points raised were about making a digital narrative. Making the digital story can be influenced by

• Point of view
• Purpose
• Emotional content
• the gift of voice
• written, illustration or visual influence 
• how the story is portrayed to the audience
• starting points (something that matters to the producer) 

Also, different forms of media were discussed which can be used for the narrative which include PowerPoint, Movie Maker, Photostory and Imovie.