front matter

Produced by the Center for Digital Storytelling, a non-profit arts
and education organization.

Center for Digital Storytelling
1803 Martin Luther King Jr. Way
Berkeley, CA 94709 USA
www.storycenter.org
info@storycenter.org
510-548-2065 tel
510-548-1345 fax

Also Available:
Cookbook Tutorial CD - containing electronic files associated with
the Tutorial found in this publication.

Digital Storytelling, Capturing Lives, Creating Community by Joe
Lambert. Digital Diner Press 2002.

We encourage you to join the Digital Storytelling Association.
Further information can be found at: www..dsaweb.org

Contents

Preface Stories in Our Lives ................................................... 1

Seven Elements ....................................................................... 9

Approaches to Scripting ....................................................... 20

Storyboarding ....................................................................... 26

Digitizing Story Elements ..................................................... 31

Introduction to Photosop Elements ..................................... 39

Introduction to iMovie .......................................................... 53

Our work in Digital Storytelling was inspired by the efforts of the late Dana W. Atchley. His seminal performance, Next Exit, and the stories he shared, continue to inspire others to honor their lives.

Find out more about Dana Atchley’s work at www.nextexit.com.

Preface

“Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is getting lost. And when you’re lost, you start to look around and listen.”

-Corey Fischer, Albert Greenberg, and Naomi NewmanA Travelling Jewish Theatre from Coming from a Great Distance Excerpted from Writing for Your Life by Deena Metzger

When I worked in theater, the first show at my venue was a show by John O’Neal, the legendary founder of the Free Souther Theater.

He was doing one of his Junebug Jabbo Jones stories, recounting the events of the rural south and the civil rights movement. 10 years later to the week, John O’Neal was the last performer before I turned my theater over to new managers, performing with Naomi Newman in Crossing the Broken Bridge, a story about African-American and Jewish American relations.

These bookends of my professional theater experience say a great deal about the role story and ancient root cultures played in forming my attitude about the storytelling arts in our civic life. In the tremendous oral traditions of African and Jewish cultures, there is an assessment of storymaking and telling that is synonymous with the value of life itself. Story is learning, celebrating, healing, and remembering. Each part of the life process necessitates it. Failure to make story honor these passages threatens the consciousness of communal identity. Honoring a life event with the sacrament of story is a much more profound spiritual value for these cultures. It enriches the individual, emotional and cultural development, and perhaps ultimately, the more mysterious development of their soul.

The circles of stories passing through the journey of my life as a digital storytelling facilitator have brought me back to this. As we are made of water, bone and biochemistry, we are made of stories. The students that share their stories in our circles recognize a metamorphosis or sorts, a changing, that makes them feel differently about their lives, their identities.

In this cookbook, we share with you our storytelling approach. We hope you will find it inspiring as well as useful.

Our cookbook has just one recipe, Momnotmom by Thenmozhi Soundararajan. To view the completed piece, visit us on-line at www.storycenter.org.

The rest of this cookbook will break this digital story down into a recipe with ingredients, that will help you to prepare it all again. We’ll talk more about stories in general too, so you can take this recipe and adapt it to your own tastes. We encourage you to make the digital story you’re hungry for.

-Joe Lambert, DirectorCenter for Digital Storytelling

1 Stories in Our Lives

A story can be as short as explaining why you bought your first car or house or as long as War and Peace. Your own desires in life, the kinds and types of struggles you have faced, and, most importantly, the number and depth of realizations you have taken from your experience all shape your natural abilities as an effective storyteller. Translating those realizations into stories in the form of essays, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, or multimedia scripts, is mainly about time. You need time to put the raw material before you, time to learn procedures and approaches for crafting the story, and time to listen to the feedback and improve upon your efforts.

For some, conceiving an idea for a story is an easy process; for others it is the beginning of a crisis. The issue of how we get from our conversational use of story to crafting a work that stands on its own falls more into the category of a general creative process. Why and how do we remember stories? What affects our ability to retain stories? How do we develop our own sense of voice and story? And what kinds of stories from our personal and work lives are likely to work as multimedia stories?

That Reminds Me of a Story

Cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson was asked in the 1950s if he believed that computer artificial intelligence was possible. He responded that he did not know, but that he believed when you would ask a computer a yes-or-no question and it responded with "that reminds me of a story," you would be close.

Our understanding of how story is at the core of human activity has been a subject of fascination for academics and experts in the computer age. Educational and artificial intelligence theorist Roger Schank has been arguing in the last decade that the road to understanding human intelligence, and therefore to constructing artificial intelligence, is built on story. In Schank’s 1992 book, Tell Me a Story, he suggests that the cyclical process of developing increasingly complex levels of stories that we apply in increasingly sophisticated ways to specific situations is one way to map the human cognitive development process. Stories are the large and small instruments of meaning, of explanation, that we store in our memories. We cannot live without them. So why is it that when many of us are asked to construct a story as a formal presentation to illustrate a point, we go blank? We informally tell stories all the time, but the conscious construction of story calls up mental blocks. Here are three possible reasons.

Overloaded Memory Bank

From the standpoint of cognitive theory, the problem is about being overwhelmed by stories that we cannot process. Our minds construct gists of memory immediately after an experience or the hearing of a story, and unless we have a dramatic experience, or have a particular reason to constantly recite the story of the experience, it slowly diminishes in our memory. Retrieval of a given story for application at the point that we are analyzing something or making a judgment naturally becomes more difficult the farther away we are in time from that originating story.

In oral culture, we humans learned to store the stories as epigrams, little tales that had a meaningful proverb at the end. The constant repetition of epigrammatic tales gave us a stock supply of references to put to appropriate use, like the hundreds of cowboy sayings I grew up with in Texas, to apply to a wide range of situations. In our current culture, many of us have not developed an epigrammatic learning equivalent to these processes.

At the same time, we are bombarded with millions of indigestible, literally unmemorable, story fragments every time we pick up a phone, bump into a friend, watch TV, listen to the radio, read a book or a newspaper, or browse the Web. We cannot process these into epigrams, recite and retain them, and so they become a jumble of fragments that actually inhibit our ability to construct a coherent story.

Only people who develop effective filtering, indexing, and repackaging tools in their minds can manage to successfully and consistently articulate meaning that reconstructs as a coherent story. We think of the skilled professionals in any given field as having developed this process for their specialty. They can tell appropriate stories-the memory of cases for a trial lawyer, for example-based on having systematized a portion of their memories. But most skilled professionals have difficulty crossing over into using examples outside their field, from their personal life or nonprofessional experience. Those who do, we often describe as storytellers.

This is one of the arguments for the lifelong Memory Box as a retrieval/filtering/con-struction system to assist us in this process. Images, videos, sounds, and other representations of events from our life can help us to reconstruct more complete memories and therefore expand the repertoire of story that we can put to use.

The Editor

Having worked in arts education settings, we are experienced with people telling us that they have no story to tell. Along with language arts educators and psychologists, we are aware that as humans most of us carry around a little voice, the editor, that tells us that what we have to say is not entertaining or substantial enough to be heard. That editor is a composite figure of everyone in our lives who has diminished our sense of creative ability, from family members, to teachers, to employers, to the society as a whole. We live in a culture where expert story making is a highly valued and rewarded craft.

Once we fall behind in developing our natural storytelling abilities to their fullest extent, it takes a much longer commitment and concentration to reclaim those abilities. As adults, time spent in these creative endeavors is generally considered frivolous and marginal by our society, and so few pursue it. Those of us who have assisted people in trying to reclaim their voice know that it requires a tremendous sensitivity to successfully bring people to a point where they trust that the stories they do tell are vital, emotionally powerful, and unique. Were it not that we as human beings have a deep intuitive sense of the power of story, it would be a wonder that we would have a popular storytelling tradition at all.

The Good Consumer Habit

Our awareness of the residual impact of mass media has grown tremendously over the past 30 years. Media literacy experts have thoroughly documented that the prolonged exposure to mass media over time disintegrates our critical intelligence. The process is, in part, the effect of the over-stimulation we already mentioned. Yet, beyond the fact that we are immersed in too much TV and other media, it is the style in which these media, particularly advertising, present themselves that actually affects our sense of ourselves as storytellers. If I can get more attention for the kind of shoes I wear or the style of my hair at one-tenth the conscious effort of explaining what the heck is wrong or right about my life in a way that moves you, why bother being a storyteller? Status and recognition, in our consumer culture, is an off-the-rack item.

Finding Your Story

For all these reasons and quite a few others, a persons’ initial efforts at story making can be frustrating. We have worked with several high-powered communicators who froze up like a deer in the headlights when it came time for them to construct an emotionally compelling personal tale.

The starting point for overcoming a creative block is to start with a small idea. It is a natural tendency to want to make a novel or screenplay out of a portion of our life experiences, to think in terms of getting all the details. But it is exactly that kind of scale that disables our memory. Our emphasis on using photographic imagery in our digital storytelling workshops facilitates the process of taking a potential story, picture by picture. Pedro Meyer, in creating his breathtakingly compelling I Photograph to Remember CD-ROM, recorded the narrative by simply setting up a tape recorder in his living room. He asked his publisher Bob Stein to sit beside him as he recorded his voice as he described each photograph to Bob. That was it. One take and it became the voiceover that was used for the CD-ROM. This process may work for your project.

Perhaps your project does not originate with visual material on hand. Take a look at our example interview questions in the next section for various kinds of short personal stories. Have someone interview you, then transcribe the words and see what they tell you about the story you are trying to conceive.

As you are working up your raw material for a story, you are also working up your storytelling, or narrative, voice. Everyone has a unique style of expressing himself or herself that can jump off the page or resonate in a storytelling presentation. Realizing that voice - making it as rich and textured as you are as a person - takes time and practice.

For many professional communicators, the process of moving from a journalistic or technical, official voice to an organic, natural voice is often difficult. It is as if we are trying to merge the two different parts of our brains, the analytical and the emotive, and most of us cannot switch back and forth without getting dizzy. The official voice is the voice of our expository writing class, of our essays and term papers, or our formal memos and letters to our professional colleagues. We have been taught that this voice carries dispassionate authority, useful perhaps in avoiding misunderstandings, but absolutely deadly as a story. Getting feedback also helps us identify our narrative voice. Reading material to someone who knows us well, and asking him or her to identify which part is true to your voice, is a useful practice. Of course, the crafting of the language, moving away from cliche, eliminating redundancy, and getting out the thesaurus to substitute your overused verbs and adjectives, is also imperative.

Take your time, though, and let the ideas and meanings sink in before you edit. If something feels overwhelmingly right, do not polish it too much. We have had lots of scripts that started out fresh and authentic but by the time the authors and collaborators got through with it, it was filled with succinct, gorgeous, yet characterless, prose. The narrative voice had been polished away.

Interviewing

This series of question sets for the "Interview" or "Self-Interview” process can assist in the development of different kinds of stories, but it is not meant to supplant a more direct scripting process if that is how you are accustomed to working. However, almost all of us can gain from having source material that appears from an un-self-conscious response to a set of directed questions.

By recording your responses, you may find that you have sufficient material to make your voiceover. Cutting and rearranging your responses using digital audio editing may be all that is required. If you take this route, keep in mind that you must take steps to have a good-quality recording.

Interviewing Techniques

You may find it easier to respond to these questions directly into a microphone in the privacy of your own home or office. If the prospect of talking to a recording device is off-putting (and it may be more likely to increase your self-consciousness than relax you), have someone interview you. This could be a friend, a spouse, relative, or coworker. This process can be both fun and revealing but requires the interviewer commit to a few common-sense ideas.

Guidelines for the Interviewer

First, study the questions so that you are not reading from the page, and feel free to ad lib. Being able to sustain eye contact assists the interviewee in relaxing and responding in a natural way.

Second, allow the interviewee to complete thoughts. Unlike a radio or TV interviewer that is concerned with "dead air" in the conversation, give the respondent all the time desired to think through and restate something that is a bit difficult to articulate. Interruptions can cause people to lose their train of thought or become self-aware and steer away from important, but perhaps emotionally difficult, information. Let the respondent tell you when he or she is finished a question before moving on to the next.

Third, when appropriate, use your own intuition to probe further to get a more specific response. Often peoples initial thought about the question only retrieves the broadest outline of memory. Feel free to request specifics or details that would clarify or expand upon a general response.

Fourth, if the story is about information that is specifically painful or traumatic in the persons life, assess carefully how far you allow the respondent to delve into these memories. In many situations where the interviewer is not a spouse or close loved one, you may cross into territory that is much better approached in the context of a purposely therapeutic environment with experienced guides or professionally trained advisors. We have come perilously close in interviews to taking people into an emotional state from which they cannot return at the session. This is embarrassing for the respondent and emotionally inconsiderate, as they may not have the therapeutic support to cope with these issues in the hours and days after the interview. Don’t feel you need to hunt for emotionally charged material to make the interview effective. If it comes naturally and comfortably, so be it.

Finally, along with ensuring privacy in the interview, make sure both interviewer and interviewee are comfortable; comfortable chairs, water at hand, and the microphone positioned so not to disrupt ease of movement. (A lavalier, or pin-on microphone, is the best.)

Kinds of Personal Stories

There are all kinds of stories in our lives that we can develop into multimedia pieces. Here are a few example question sets for some of these stories. Adapting any one of the question sets by integrating sets, or developing a separate set, is encouraged.

The Story About Someone Important

Character Stories

How we love, are inspired by, want to recognize, finding meaning in our relationship to, another person or even pet, is deeply important to us. Perhaps the majority of the stories created in our workshops are about a relationship with a singular other. And in the best of stories they tell us more about ourselves than the details of our own life story.

Memorial Stories

Honoring and remembering people who have passed is an essential part of the process of grieving. While these stories are often the most difficult and painful to produce, the results are the most powerful.

-What is or had been your relationship to this person?

-How would you describe this person (physical appearance, character, etc.)?

-Is there an event/incident that best captures their character?

-What about them do/did you most enjoy?

-What about them drives you crazy?

-What lesson did they give you they you feel is important?

-If you had something to say to them, that they may have never heard you say, what would it be?

The Story About an Event in My Life

Adventure Stories

One of the reasons we travel is that the break from the norm of our lives helps to create vivid memories. All of us who travel, or go on serious adventures, know that the experience is usually an invitation to challenge ourselves, to change our perspective about our lives, to reassess. We often return from these experiences with personal realizations, and the process of recounting our travel stories is as much about sharing those realizations as sharing the sense of beauty or interest in the place visited.

But strangely enough, while almost everyone tells good travel stories, it is often difficult to make an effective multimedia piece. We rarely think about constructing a story with our photographs or videos in advance of a trip. And we do not want to take ourselves out of the most exhilarating moments by taking out a camera and recording. Before your next trip, think about creating a story outline based on an archetype prior to your visit, and what sorts of images, video, or sounds would be useful to establish the story. That way you can gather some story-related shots at your leisure.

Accomplishment Stories

There are accomplishment stories about achieving a goal, like graduating from school, landing a major contract, or being on the winning team in a sporting event. These stories easily fit into the desire-struggle-realization structure of a classic story. They also tend to be documented, so you might find it easy to construct a multimedia story. Television sports has taken up the accomplishment story as a staple, and it might be helpful for you to look at and deconstruct an "Olympic moment" to see how they balance establishing information, interviews, and voiceover.

-What was the event (time, place, incident, or series of incidents)?
-What was your relationship to the event?
-With what other people did you experience this event?
-Was there a defining moment in the event?
-How did you feel during this event (fear, exhilaration, sharpened awareness, joy)?
-Why did you learn from this event?
-How did this event change your life?

The Story About a Place in My Life

Up until this century, 90% of the worlds population was born, lived, and died without ever leaving a ten-mile radius of their homes. While this is difficult for us to imagine, our sense of place is the basis of many profound stories. One of the earliest interactive storytelling Web sites was a German project, 1,000 Rooms, that invited people to send a single image of their room at home, and to tell a story about their relationship to their room. Hundreds of people responded with their own intimate stories. You may have a story about your home, an ancestral home, a town, a park, mountain, or forest you love, a restaurant, store, or gathering place. Your insights into place give us insight about your sense of values and connection to community.

-How would you describe the place?
-With whom did you share this place?
-What general experiences do you relate to this place?
-Was there a defining experience at the place?
-What lessons about yourself do you draw from your relationship to this place?
-If you have returned to this place, how has it changed?

The Story About What I Do

Life story for many people in professional careers is shaped by their jobs. Author Studs Terkel collected a series of interviews in his book, "Working", that demonstrated that we all have unique ways of perceiving and valuing our jobs. For other people, the thing that they do that has most value to them is their hobby or ongoing social commitments. Poignancy often comes from looking at the familiar in a new way, with a new meaning. The details of the tasks, the culture of the characters that inhabit our workplace, our spiritual or philosophical relationship to work, avocational or vocational, lead us into many stories.

-What is your profession or ongoing interest?

-What experiences, interests, knowledge in your previous life prepared you for this activity?

-Was there an initial event that most affected your decision to pursue this interest?

-Who influenced or assisted you in shaping your career, interest, or skill in this area?

-How has your profession or interest affected your life as a whole (family, friends, where you live)?

-What has been the highlight of your vocational/avocational life?

Other Personal Stories

Recovery Stories

Sharing the experience of overcoming a great challenge in life, like a health crisis or a great personal obstacle, is the fundamental archetype in human story making. If you can transmit the range of experience from descent, to crisis, to realization, you can always move an audience.

Love Stories

Romance and partnership, familial or fraternal love, also naturally lend themselves to the desire-struggle-realization formula. We all want to know how someone met their partner, what it was like when the baby was born, or what our relationship is with our siblings and parents. We constantly test everyones experience in these fundamental relationships to affirm our own. These are also stories that tend to have plenty of existing documentation.

Discovery Stories

The process of learning is a rich field to mine for stories. The detective in us gets great pleasure in illustrating how we uncovered the facts to get at the truth, whether it is in fixing a broken bicycle or developing a new product.

Don’t Just Sit There

As you decide what story would best serve your personal needs, or the needs of your performing or presentation context, keep in mind that these categories are in no way sacrosanct. They cross over in a number of ways. It is also probable that you will come up with your own additional categories or other ways of dissecting the stories in your mind.

One of the hardest, but most important thing to do, is getting started. Because many of these stories ask us to reveal things about ourselves that make us feel vulnerable, it is a procrastinator’s paradise. Just get up, start answering questions on a tape recorder, writing things down, gathering up the photos, and looking at the old videos, and bounce your ideas around your friends and family.

Life is full of stories, but you may not have a lifetime to capture them as movies. So, go for it!

2 Seven Elements

There are many kinds of stories, and many ways to find your creative voice as a storyteller, but it is almost impossible to imagine the number of ways a single story can be structured. And, when you factor in the choices of the filmmaker; in design of visual elements and audio, in thinking about how the story is performed and paced, and what is possible in the world of computer-generated effects, we are talking about an infinite variety of expression.

Fortunately, the participants in our classes arrive with an enormous range of skills and life experience that suggests a particular path of individual style and structure to their story. Our role and digital storytelling facilitators is to coaching a storyteller past the particular roadblocks they face. Story coaching is a dynamic process, not a prescribed one. An entire range of issues must be considered while offering suggestions, both technical and emotional. There are as many ways as there are people in which to do this.

When we succeed in providing the right sort of feedback to the creator, we often witness an extraordinary transformation in the quality of story. It is gratifying for us as teachers to bring a new story to life. To see the eyes of the creator well up with tears of surprise and joy at what he or she has accomplished, and to see others moved and inspired by the power of the piece, is what keeps us going, class after class.

The seven elements evolved after teaching our workshops for a couple of years, when we decided to introduce each class to elements of constructing a multimedia story. Between the emotional fragility of exploring a personal issue, and feelings of inadequacy when working with computers or multimedia, the last thing our students needed was someone dictating a specific formula to them. So we kept it simple. Illustrating our few points with examples of student work from previous classes, our principal consideration was to make it brief and inspirational.

Experience has shown us that even people with years of training in various kinds of storytelling and communication lose touch with the fundamentals of story structure and media design. These ideas are a starting point. From there you can do as we have done: develop mentors, develop a library of resources, and deepen your practice to improve your skills and develop the level of mastery that makes sense for your occupation and interests.

The seven elements we describe in the pages that follow give you a great deal to consider in constructing your story. We emphasize our storytelling process in group settings because we believe that most do not just read a book and do the work. Storytelling is meant to be a collaborative art. It is much more realistic this way, and much more fun.

1. Point (of View)

What makes a story a story? Dictionary definitions may call it a narrative, a tale, a report, an account, and that would seem to cover it.

But hold on. When we think of a story, true or imagined, we do not consider someone sitting in front of us reciting a series of events like a robot: "This happened, then this happened, and then this happened." Hardly anyone narrates events in their lives without some good reason for it.

We believe all stories are told to make a point. Most stories follow the pattern of describing a desire, a need, or a problem that must be addressed by a central character. They follow the action the desire leads us to take, and then reveal realizations or insights that occurred as a result of experiencing the events of our actions and their relationship to our original desire. By point of view, we primarily are addressing this issue of defining the specific realization you, as an author, are trying to communicate within your story. Because every part of the story can service this point, it becomes imperative to define this goal in order to direct the editing process.

We need to look no further than proverbs to illustrate what we mean by a point of view. "A stitch in time saves nine." "A penny wise and a pound foolish." These are the points of stories, what somebody realized is the actual result, versus the desired effect, of a planned action. We may have forgotten the stories, but we remember the point. In novels or theater, another way of expressing the point of the story is the central premise. For example, in King Lear, the point or central premise is "blind trust leads to destruction." In Macbeth, it is "unbridled greed leads to destruction." Every part of the dramatic action can be boiled down to serving these points of view, and our connection with the story often succeeds or fails in how we understand the central premise as the operating context for the story’s action. In well-crafted stories, the point may be a little less apparent than the moral of a fairy tale, and it might require some thought, but if the story touched you, chances are you can define some central points or the transformative realizations the author intended.

Example

In 1994, we assisted on a project called The Answer, created by the husband-and-wife team of Rob Decker and Suzanne Serpas. They were both psychologists with an interest in the potential of autobiography as a therapeutic tool. They came to us with a large box of stock commercial images and an ambitious concept to provide a metaphoric look at the importance of a humanist perspective on the world, a kind of commercial for their brand of psychotherapy. We felt that they had defined their subject so broadly that they would not be able to complete the project over the weekend. We also felt that their personal connection to the point of the story was lost. We suggested they narrow the subject and asked if they had an example of the kind of realization they wanted their audience to experience. Rob subsequently offered the story that became the script of the final piece:

The other day I asked my 7-year-old daughter about the meaning of life. "Well," she answered without hesitation, "there’s having fun, having love in your family, and learning things, you know, knowledge." I spent 49 years searching for the meaning of life. I guess I should have had the good sense to ask a kid in the first place.

They simply juxtaposed Rob reciting the story with the standard family images and home video and voila: a powerful little tale about their realization about how we define our essential human values from an early age.

In thinking about the point of a story, we should also be considering the reason for the story. Why this story, now, for this group of people? Defining these issues inevitably helps to define which of the many proverbial summations we might take from a given story.

Let’s imagine a fairly typical process of developing a story, and the struggle to define point of view.

Esperanza has decided to make a story about her non-profit organization, Familias Unidas, a community organization assisting low income Latino families with negotiating the social service systems. From the organizational brochure, and from all the grant proposals she has written, she has a great deal of argumentation about why her organization exists and why it deserves continued community support. She also has 10 years of images of work with community members, special events, staff members, and the several times the organization has been recognized with awards.

But as she thinks about the purpose of her story, she realizes the mission statement and lists of achievements do not really capture the emotional essence of what they do. If the digital story is going to be presented to their supporters at the Christmas fundraiser and then get put on the website, it needs to move people, not just present a list of activities and goals and objectives.

What she decides is to create a portrait of one of the families they have helped. Esperanza has always liked the profiles of community service she has seen on television. She knows just the family, the Sanchez family. She goes to meet with them, and they are interested. But as they talk about the role of Familias Unidas in their lives, Esperanza realizes their story only touches on one or two of the half dozen programs the organization offers. She needs several families to capture a broad enough point of view about the organization to connect with the different stakeholders in her communities of support. This is so much work. "This will never get done," Esperanza thinks. She is the director of the program, and as it is, she barely has time to work on the project.

That night, she speaks with her partner, Carolina, who laughs about how Esperanza is always getting overwhelmed. "Just like how you started the whole thing, fresh out of college, full of ideals, you start helping a few friends of your cousin get some paperwork turned in for the local clinic, and the next thing you were helping everyone in the vecino. You hardly slept then." Esperanza remembered these times, and how passionate she felt, and how her passion inspired others to take up this work, and to give donations to support it. Maybe that’s the story, not just what we do, but why we do it, how caring starts with just one person. She calls her cousin and asks if he would be willing to tell the story of those first projects. He says he would be honored. She starts writing, and the words flow. From this beginning story she connects the Sanchez family’s experience to show how the program became professionalized, and she finishes with a reflection on her own growth and the gifts that this work has given her.

At midnight, she closes her laptop. Esperanza sees the movie playing in her head. "I know just the images to use," she says to herself. On the desk next to her computer, she has an ofrenda, an alter, to her grandmother. Just as she lights the candle, as she does each night before bed, she feels a light puff of air blow from over her shoulder. She looks back. Nothing.

A breath? An affirmation.

Maybe Esperanza got more than her name from her abuelita.

From this story, you can see how the process of defining premise is both demanding and enlightening. We have seen in project after project, workshop participants struggling for that particular clarity of purpose, having the insight come to them at the last moment, and the piece practically editing itself once they find the ideal point of view.

The story of Esperanza also illustrates another perspective we have on Point of View. We believe all stories are personal. For most storytellers, couching the story in the first-person point of view, either throughout the story or as a frame around the story, is an invitation to hearing the story in a more personal context. This tends to increase our attention as we look for insights about you as a storyteller. That is, "This is my version of events and my realizations, and I am self-aware about how my own prejudices, expertise, and frames of reference affect the ‘truth’ about the story."

We, as information consumers, are becoming increasingly sophisticated at discerning the authenticity of information. In general, we prefer the frank admission of responsibility that the first-person voice provides to the authoritative, seemingly neutral, but nevertheless obscure stance of the third-person voice.

In our workshops, we have advised against the brochure-ware approach to narrative associated with a business language, bureaucrateze or "grant-speak" that is endemic in our culture. When possible, the person making the story should find their own connection to the material. If an organization wants to capture the stories of their clients, consumers, staff members, then they should invite those stakeholders to write and create their own digital stories.

2. Dramatic Question

Simply making a point doesn’t necessarily keep people’s attention throughout a story. Well-crafted stories, from Shakespeare to Seinfeld, set up a tension from the beginning that holds you until the story is over.

In Tristane Rainer’s Your Life As Story, she reduces all stories to a desire-action-real-ization model. For her, a story establishes a central desire in the beginning in such a way that the satisfaction or denial of that desire must be resolved in order for the story to end. The conflicts that arise between our desires being met and the desire of other characters or larger forces to stop us creates the dramatic tension.

Dramatic and storytelling theorists, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists since the time of Aristotle have attempted to analyze how the action of a story is established and sustained. We have found that delineating structural story components for students who are essentially working in a short narrative form is much too complicated. Writing a script that slavishly follows a formal structure tends to create wooden, melodramatic writing that we can smell a mile off as not reflecting the author’s true voice. So we have reduced these several concepts to one.

We refer to a term coined from dramatic theory, "the dramatic question," to summarize an approach. In a romance, will the girl get the guy? In an adventure, will the hero reach the goal? In a crime or murder mystery, who did it? When any of these questions are answered, the story is over.

Again, sophisticated story making distinguishes itself by burying the presentation of the dramatic question, like the realization, in ways that do not call attention to the underlying structure.

Monte Hallis’ piece, Tanya, was created in the very first digital storytelling class we taught at the American Film Institute in 1993. It remains one of the most poignant and efficient expressions of digital storytelling we have experienced and also has served as an ideal example of a number of the elements we are currently describing, particularly the dramatic question.

When I was young, I never really understood what friendship was. I was shy, and confused friendship with popularity. Last year I met Tanya, and we became the kind of friends that most people are, acquaintances. Tanya had started an organization for women like herself. Tanya had AIDS and knew she would die soon, and she wanted to find someone to love and care for her children. The minute Tanya opened her mouth it was like the whole world had been waiting to hear her story. But despite all her work, she really felt she had accomplished one thing, and it was [her friendship with] me, and I couldn’t let her dreams die with her. The other night Tanya told me to lay my head down next to hers. She whispered, "Monte Fae, all we got is where we are going." I couldn’t believe she knew my middle name.

The statement of the dramatic question is elegantly posed and resolved in the first and closing lines. Monte states at the beginning that she didn’t understand friendship. At the end she leaves us with a rather open-ended statement, "I couldn’t believe she knew my middle name." It does not take much sophistication to interpret the dramatic question, "What is the meaning of friendship?" The answer suggests that it is the ways in which we un–consciously exchange intimate information with each other.

In this case, the particular meaning of the resolution of the dramatic question is in fact the central point of the story. But here is an important distinction. What we are really talking about with the dramatic question is a structural "setup," corresponding to a logical "payoff." The meaning of the story, as we have suggested, doesn’t have to have anything to do with the structure, just as there are hundreds of ways to draw different meanings out of any given sequence of events.

We are trained from early on to recognize that different dramatic questions often lead to predictable answers. If the question is about how the girl gets the guy, our immediate assumption is that either the guy, or someone the guy knows, doesn’t want the guy to be gotten. As a result, manipulating expectations is precisely what entertains us. What if the girl thinks she wants one guy, but she really wants the guy who is trying to stop her from getting the original guy? What if she decides to chuck the whole thing and become a nun? Are we unhappy? Only if there was nothing to suggest that these events were consistent with her behavior will we be confused or dismayed. A good author will make you think the central dramatic question was "Will the girl get the guy?" when it really was "Will the girl find happiness?" and we have learned early on that she doesn’t define herself completely by her role as spousal partner. If you watch movies, you know the possibilities for manipulating the dramatic question are endless.

When we have the expectation pulled out from under us in a story, when the realization is dramatically different than the setup, it tickles us. The classic short story does the same, leading us quickly into a direction that establishes our expectations, only to twist the expectation at the end.

The more you learn about dramatic structure, the more you dissect familiar stories into their structural components. The more you experiment with rewarding or surprising your audience’s expectations sparked by a dramatic question, the more rich and complex your stories will become.

3. Emotional Content

All of us have been in the middle of a story, a novel, a film, a theatrical or storytelling performance and found ourselves emotionally engaged. It is as if the story had reached inside our consciousness and taken hold of us, and we know in that moment that we are in for a tearful or joyous ride.

This effect is principally a result of a truthful approach to emotional material. A story that deals directly with the fundamental emotional paradigms—of death and our sense of loss, of love and loneliness, of confidence and vulnerability, of acceptance and rejection—will stake a claim on our hearts. Beginning with content that addresses or couches itself in one or another of those contexts will improve the likelihood that you are going to hold an audience’s attention.

One of the fundamental ways to understand story’s role in our lives is to think of most stories as resurrection tales. A character must know a negation of their desire in order to finally achieve their desire. In the tragic form, the protagonist is usually destroyed in order that other characters, and we the audience, can understand the consequence of the fatal flaw of the character, and/or the poignant power of circum-stance/fate. In the comic form, love must certainly be lost at some point, for us to feel great satisfaction of the final hoped for embrace. The hero must be on the very edge of extinction before victory or the goal of the quest is achieved.

Why is this so powerful? On one level, everyone of us has to wake up in the morning, and choose to go on, to resurrect ourselves in the face of fate and circumstance, the memory of loss and almost unbearable struggle, and our own sense of weakness and vulnerability. The stories we are drawn to, that resonate in our direct emotional need, in general, are those that give us a reason to make that decision to go forward. They inspire us. The very word inspire, in its archaic meaning, is to breath again. Stories encourage us to take one more breath, to swim up to the surface, above our despair, and live.

We believe all stories can have an element of these emotional paradigms. Even our story about Esperanza’s trying to get her own story together for her organization, we had the potential of negation. She almost gives up, having become overwhelmed with the problem of achieving her goal. When you look at the story you want to tell, think about where in the story was the possibility that what was desired-a happy vacation, success in the project, understanding in a relationship-can be contrasted with its opposite- a rainy, nasty day on the beach, a disastrous change in plans, a painful argument. How we get past the hard part, and still get what we desire, that is what we want to know.

These are areas that for many of us are a challenge to express in a piece of personal writing or media. We may lack the experience of trying, as most if not all of our formal training processes in narrative—from scholarly essays to journalistic reports— stress distance and de-emotionalized perspectives. Or we may be unresolved about the emotional material, keeping us from gaining perspective or meaning from these experiences. The result of our failure to express our most honest understandings about these kinds of subject matter can lead us to trivialize or overdramatize the material. It can also lead us to being simply overwhelmed by feelings that are brought to the surface.

Is it worth the effort to expose oneself emotionally? In most cases, it is. In our experience with the group production process, people value the courage to explore the intimate space of emotional vulnerability so highly that they will go out of their way to support those willing to attempt emotionally sensitive stories. But sometimes we are forced to steer students away from overpowering material, to select a different approach, or abandon the subject of the story entirely. This part of digital storytelling requires plain old-fashioned common sense and maturity.

Along these lines, many people that read this may want to experiment with teaching or leading workshops as a way to mine powerful stories from a group of associates for the purposes of linking those emotions to a product, cause, or service. This may be quite effective, but it could also be exploitative.

We want to emphasize that exploring emotional material is a personal decision. Our workshops are predicated on the idea of creating a safe place for people to share stories. Protecting and honoring the trust of the workshop is a central tenet of the work. That safety can not be extended to broadcast or publication, or to all potential audiences. Unexpected reactions, innocent or malevolent interpretations that disrespect the author’s intent are possible once the work is released to a broad audience. Thinking through the degree of your emotional vulnerability in shaping the point of view of the story, in regards to audience, is always important.

4. The Gift of Your Voice

In our classes we encourage the storyteller to record a voiceover. Students may want to make a piece with only images and music, and some are working on stories that they feel are best suited to a particular voiceover or character representation. What we have learned in this process is in itself revealing.

I grew up with a lisp. When I was seven or eight, I had to go to speech therapy classes thso I wouldn’t thspeak thso listhpisthly. Like most kids, it made me hate the way my voice sounded. That didn’t stop me from being the class clown and being the ham in the school productions, or perhaps it emboldened me. But when I first ran into a tape recorder, I couldn’t stand the way I sounded. And frankly, it still bothers me.

Having worked with a lot of people who are creating a piece of video that includes their voice for the first time, I realize I am not alone. Either we feel we don’t have the clearest diction, or our voices waver, or we are too soft, or too gravelly, or just not like those caramel-textured assertive voices that come across our television sets and radios.

Truly, our voice is a great gift. Those of us fortunate enough to be able to talk out loud should love our voices, because they tell everyone so much about who we are, both how strong we can be and how fragile.

We listen to words spoken in various inflections and go into different modes of listening, which are also different modes of conscious interaction. When we hear conversational tones, we are listening for the moment that suggests response or affirmation, the "Oh I agree, but..." or the "hm-hmm." In a speech we are listening for an applause line. In a lecture, we are listening for the major points, the outline. In a story, we are listening for an organic rhythmic pattern that allows us to float into reverie. In the place of reverie we have a complex interaction between following the story and allowing the associative memories the story conjures up to wash over us. Consistency in presentation is what allows us in the audience to participate, and breaking consistency, such as a person who is reciting a monologue suddenly asking someone in the front row a question, is jarring.

We have one specific concern to address about recording our voices: reading versus reciting the script. We all know what it feels like to be at a public event when someone reads a speech from beginning to end. It is downright uncomfortable. We do not know how to interact. We are caught someplace between waiting for the speaker to give pause for us to respond and wanting to drift into reverie, but the cadence and style of presentation does not allow it. We also know why people end up reading texts. They are petrified to speak and/or they simply do not have the time to practice the speech enough so that they can recite from memory. Similarly, in recording a voiceover from a script in our workshops, there usually is a combination of fear and lack of time for practice that means a reading seems like the only option.

The easiest way to improve upon a recording of your voice is to keep the writing terse. Record several takes of the text. The nice thing about a digital sound file is that you can mix and match each of the recording takes to create the best-sounding version. We suggest you work at speaking slowly in a conversational style. Finally, digitally constructing the story from a recorded interview is always a good fallback.

5. The Power of the Soundtrack

In our experience working with beginning students, their intuitive sense of what music is appropriate for a media piece is by far their most developed skill in the storytelling arts. In an era where we describe an entire generation as "the children of MTV," as people defined by their absorption of visual media in the context of music, is it any real surprise?

We have come to believe that people now walk around with soundtracks running in their heads. Those soundtracks set the mood of our day, change the way we perceive the visual information streaming into our eyes, and establish a rhythm for our step. It is as if by listening to or imagining a specific slice of music, we are putting ourselves into our own movie, a movie that puts our life into a clearer perspective, or at least entertains us.

From earlier and earlier ages we are aware of the trick that music can play on our perception of visual information. We are all aware of how music in a film stirs up an emotional response very different than what the visual information inherently suggests.

The sudden opening of the door becomes the prelude to disaster, when the swelling treble of orchestrated strings calls out suspense to our ears. A sweetly flowing melody over two people looking at each other for the first time signals that these are the romantic characters we will be following in the plot. We know upbeat music means happy endings, slow and tremulous music means sadness is forecast, fast music means action, heroic music means battles and victorious heroes are likely. We know the stereotype, and it is repeated enough from one show to the next that we often laugh when we catch ourselves being caught up in the manipulation. As such, even the beginning student makes appropriate decisions about music that either play into or against the stereotype.

The majority of our students use popular lyrical music. While the songs usually work, mistakes are sometimes made in mixing the lyrical story of the song and the voiceover narrative in a way that gives us an unintended conflict of meaning. I remember a young student who liked a particular song that had an appropriate tempo and timbre for his story about his family, but in listening a bit more to the lyrics, we realized the song was a fairly steamy account of passion. We asked if that was intended and the student admitted that he had not really thought about what was being said in the song.

Instrumental music, be it classical, folk, jazz, or ambient, is often better suited to the style and meaning of the story’s text and visual narratives. The digital context makes testing a particular music in the video much easier than in film and analog media, and so experimentation is encouraged. You may find that, by going against the expected, you create another complete layer of meaning that adds depth and complexity to your story.

Are music videos, or the juxtaposition of music and visual information in a media piece without text and voiceover, storytelling? The answer is yes. However, the specificity of language and the complexity of information that the human voice provides adds enormous emotional substance and authenticity to the media story. So far we have not experienced a single music video that created as powerful an emotional impact as the same story would have with the addition of the author’s voice. The other area of sound use popular in the film and video tradition is sound effects and other elements of sound design beyond the mix of music and text. There is no question that the greater design of ambient sound or appropriate noises can add complexity to the narrative. They also can be juxtaposed to add surprise and humor. The development of these skills should be considered if the storytelling projects call for an increased sense of realism or, for that matter, surrealism. Otherwise, it is perhaps best not to experiment with sound effects as their incidental use is usually more of a distraction.

Using one’s own voice and existing personal image and moving image archival material has the advantage of being copyrighted by you as the author. By using other's music, you are also likely crossing into the territory of deciding what should be the appropriate fair use of the copyrighted material. Put simply, if you are going to make money directly or indirectly by the presentation or distribution of the piece you have created, then you should have the composer's permission to use the music. Fortunately, numerous companies have developed copyright-free music collections and software to assist you in designing a soundtrack that is wholly yours. Finding a friend to play a piano or strum a guitar can also solve this problem. Be creative.

6. Economy

Despite our emphasis on story, text, and sound, digital media for many storytellers is principally a visual medium that integrates the other elements. As a visual medium we are concerned with composition and juxtaposition of visual elements in a single screen and over time. Since our emphasis is in repurposing existing images and video, your initial compositional considerations were already decided by your relative skill in shooting a picture or framing a video. Our concern is more with sequential composition.

In any story we use a process called closure. Closure means recognizing the pattern of information being shown or described to us in bits and pieces, and completing the pattern in our minds. In spoken word or a written narrative, we are operating at a high level of closure as we are filling in all the pictures suggested by a text or words from images and memories in our brains. If I start a story, "Once upon a midnight dreary..." you are likely to immediately fill in a mental image of a foreboding castle, rainstorms, ravens, the works. We need specific sensual details, shapes, smells, textures to be stated for us to fill in the picture in our mind.

Storytelling with images means consciously economizing language in relationship to the narrative that is provided by the juxtaposition of images. There are two tracks of meaning, the visual and the auditory, and we need to think about the degree of closure each provides in relation to the other. In a normal screenwriting process, the writer is conscious of the visual information as the context for the spoken dialogue or narration, and he or she writes into the visual backdrop of the scenes. If the writer and director do a good job, they will shoot just what is necessary to keep the story visually rich while moving forward, with only the minimum of dialogue and number of scenes necessary to allow us to envision the larger story.

However, we generally are working with projects where the images and scenes exist prior to the script, as in the family album. So the natural approach is to make a visual narrative, to line up the photos on a table, and then figure out what to say about the pictures. The advantage is that you can be very specific about what information you must fill in to make sense of the narrative. The disadvantage is that if there is too big of a gap for the audience to close between images, you are left with holes in your story that you have to invent pictures to fill. We have decided that there is no right or wrong way to compose in this situation—script first or image sequence first. Different people have intuitive skills in the visual or text modes.

Economy is generally the largest problem with telling a story. Most people do not realize that the story they have to tell can be effectively illustrated with a small number of images and video, and a relatively short text. We purposely put limitations on the number of images and video clips our students use. We also suggest that, if they are starting with a script, they create a storyboard with their material and look at every possible way to edit their words prior to beginning the production process.

In this context, it is also worth discussing the concept of explicit versus implicit illustration and the territory of metaphor and symbolism.

Invariably some part of your story calls out for the use of an image that is not literally related to the subject being described. In talking about end of a romance, you may not have an image that can literally represent loss, but you could have a photograph tearing apart, or a heart splitting into two halfs. The implicit meaning, the metaphor, is clear to almost anyone.

Similarly, we can "read" the juxtaposition of visual images as having implicit meaning that is beyond what one or the other image explicitly means by itself. If we have an image of a couple sitting together, followed by the image one of the couple sitting alone next to an empty chair, we will read the juxtaposition as loss.

By considering illustrations with meaning that implicitly relate to our narration, we can also solve a number of problems we have in filling in the "gaps" in our storyboard.

7. Pacing

Often the most transparent feature of a story is how it is paced. Pacing is considered by many to be the true secret of successful storytelling. The rhythm of a story determines much of what sustains an audience’s interest. A fast-paced movie with many quick edits and upbeat music can suggest urgency, action, nervousness, exasperation, and excitement. Conversely, a slow pace will suggest contemplation, romanticism, relaxation, or simple pleasures.

Changing pace, even in a short digital story, is very effective. Our narrative can have starts and stops, pauses, and quickly spurted phrases. You can always change music tempo to build a sense of action or release. Moving from a panning effect on a still image that slowly stretches out our concentration, followed by a burst of images in staccato succession, staggers our senses and vitalizes the media piece.

And vitality is the essential issue. Good stories breathe. They move along generally at an even pace, but once in a while they stop. They take a deep breath and proceed. Or if the story calls for it they walk a little faster, and faster until they are running, but sooner or later they have to run out of breath and stop and wheeze at the side of the road. Anything that feels like a mechanical rhythm, anything that does not allow for that pause, to let us consider what the story has revealed, soon loses our interest.

Again, trust your own sense of what works. Everyone moves at his or her own pace.

Finally