Exercise Six: Creating a Two-Media Story


 

Now you are ready to take the leap, and try your hand at a two-media version of one of your draft-stories.

 

Instructions

 

1.  Choose the media to suit your story:

 

You can choose to use text-and-images or image-and-audio for this exercise.  Look back at your audio story and decide whether you would like to pull images into that story.

What would be gained from the addition of images?  Lost?  Do you have images that would suit the story?  If you do not, you can find images on the internet with Creative Commons licenses.  Consult Alan Levine's storytelling wiki for  good ideas about where to find media.

 

If you decide to work with text and images, think about whether you wish to use images and text next to one another, or would you like to write on the images, and create a slide show story, as I have done in this piece, Into the Storm.  How would your choice affect your message?

 

 

2. Choose the tool to suit your story:

 

Voice and image:  Soundslides or Voicethread;  (You could also try out one of the tools Alan Levine suggests.)

 

Text and Image:  Picnik and Flickr for writing-on-images;  Word or Community Almanac for writing and images.

 

Or you could choose iMovie or Windows Moviemaker or Jumpcut online and limit yourself to two media.

 

 

 

3. IMAGES

 

 

Consider what kinds of images will help tell the story: literal or metaphorical, concrete or abstract, long-shot and close-up, color or not, and how the images will move from one to the next, considering how an image is “a peculiar and paradoxical creature both concrete and abstract.” (W. J. Thomas Mitchell (2005) What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press p. xvii)

 

 

Questions to ask:

 

Why these images?

 

 

How do they contribute to meaning rather than look pretty?

 

 

How do they work individually and together?

 

 

How do they carry the story’s drama?

 

 

 

Write the three-sentence version of the visual narrative:

 

 

 

Sentence 1- Beginning:

 

 

 

Sentence 2- Middle:

 

 

 

Sentence 3-End:

 

 

4.  Create your story. Make it as short as possible without losing your point or your voice.  (60 minutes)

 

 

5.  Share the stories in the full group and discuss successes and failures.