Archive for the ‘Transmedia storytelling’ Category
The Joy of Stats – making data visible (and fun)
Hans Rosling’s BBC program “The Joy of Stats” is a real “mind-opener” for non-fiction storytellers who want to engage audiences in the swirling world of data that surrounds us today.
Teaching with Comic Life
As I’ve learned from my 7-year old, graphic novels are tremendously appealing to young minds. Here’s a novel way to engage kids in the classroom by creating their own illustrated stories using digital tools.
A few years ago I put together a really rudimentary teaching guide to using Comic Life in the classroom. It was thrown together as a series of test lessons but I was asked for a copy and thus made it public.
Last December I have it a little refresh to cover Comic Life 2 although it is still patchy around the corners. The unit covers the idea of visual story telling and communicating a narrative with only 6 photos. You can obviously adjust the rules according to age group, for example you might allow some text direction in the comic frames.
Comic Life is a digital story telling application with a difference. The simple graphical user interface and intuitive drag and drop workflow makes it a perfect tool for classrooms both at primary and secondary level. The Comic Life Application is intuitive and fun to use, it simply removes any ICT barrier and allows pupils to focus on creative communication.
Comic Life is particularly affordable but if you are unsure of its benefits in the classroom situation a trial version is available via the www.plasq.com website.
I first devised this short unit for use with the original version of Comic Life and keystage 3 level students.
To build in a slightly deeper ICT dimension I only allowed photos to be taken with a mobile device that offered bluetooth file transfer (sadly not an iPhone). The students would take the photos, bluetooth them across to the Mac, create the comic and bluetooth the final document to their friends.
The workflow from mobile phone photos to Comic Life and then back to the phone demonstrates just how possible a paperless classroom could be and how much students enjoy capturing and processing images from mobile devices. Zero paper, maximum fun.
TASK
In small groups pupils will write and communicate a story using only eight photos and the Comic Life Application. For older students you may want to limit the number of photos to six and if you really want to challenge the students then you could forbid them using any text in their story.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
- On successful completion of this task pupils will be able to use bluetooth to transfer files to and from am computer.
- On successful completion of the task pupils will be able use photos taken with a mobile phone in their own documents / coursework etc.
- On successful completion of the task pupils will be able to manipulate / resize and filter their photographs.
- On successful completion of the task pupils will be able to use suitable software applications to communicate in a range of different ways.
TRANSFERABLE SKILLS
The transferable skills covered in the unit include : Working with others, Organising oneself, Communication, Critical and discriminating skills, Reflection and decision making skills.
The zip file contains a PDF of the document as well an ePub version ready for your favourite ebook reader. The ePub version has been tested in iBooks and works pretty well.
Conditions
Please do not redistribute the ebook or link to the file directly. Do though, feel free to link to this page and spread the word. Any comments? please post them below.
Why is Lance Weiler the “dean” of Transmedia? Read on…
Transmedia: Entertainment reimagined
08 July 10Esther Robinson got off the R train in Astoria, Queens, and started walking to the American Museum of the Moving Image. It was a warm July evening in 2007 and Robinson, then 37 years old and a filmmaker, had come with a friend to see a movie, Head Trauma. As they approached the cinema, she noticed that the payphones were ringing — all four of them. “You forget payphones exist,” recalls Robinson. “That was the first thing I noticed.” She picked one up: all she could hear were fragments of a conversation, “sounds of madness”. Outside the cinema, a preacher in short sleeves and a tie was raving, handing out apocalyptic comic books to passers-by. He pressed one into Robinson’s hand as she hurried past, anxious to get to the film. The opening credits prompted the audience to send in a text to a given number. As the film rolled, they started receiving “weird text messages”; phones were ringing.
The film was about a drifter who inherits his mother’s house and starts to lose his mind. The next day, back in Brooklyn, Robinson found the comic in her handbag. On the back was written: “Do you want to play a game?”, along with an address, headtraumamovie.com. She typed it in to her computer. What she found was an online game that continued the story. “In the middle of it, the phone rang,” she says. She recognised the voice. It was the film’s “hooded villain”. He started asking questions: “Do you feel guilty? Have you ever lost consciousness?” Last, he asked Robinson to tell him her darkest secret. Her answer started playing back on a loop through her computer speakers. Robinson clicked on the exit box. She kept clicking, but nothing happened. Her phone buzzed with a text: “Where are you going? We’re not finished yet…” At that point, Robinson was dumped into a conference call with other cinema goers who had just gone through the same experience. “We were all like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It was totally nuts.”
Unwittingly, she had just participated in an emerging form of mainstream entertainment. Lance Weiler, the creator of Head Trauma, had programmed software to make all the payphones on the block ring. The preacher was an actor, a lead in the feature. Based on the participants’ responses to the automated phone calls, audio and video launched on the desktop screen. The exit box was a fake. Clicking on it sent that last text. For Weiler, a 41-year-old New Yorker, the experience “demonstrated the fluidity of an audience. After the movie ended, it followed people home.”
Lance Weiler is bringing a transmedia education project to Montreal
Forty children and two teachers on different sides of the continent will work together this fall to produce stories and artwork about a robot. These artifacts will board a commercial rocket and, through an actual space launch, make their way to the International Space Station. The “dean” of transmedia is taking transmedia storytelling in some great (and local) directions.
Robot Heart Stories
This fall I’ll be releasing an exciting new participatory storytelling project focused on experiential education, storytelling and creative collaboration.
A robot has crash landed in Montreal and now must make her way to LA in order to find her space craft and return home. Two third grade classes in underprivileged neighborhoods, one in Montreal (French speaking) and the other in LA (English speaking) engage in an experiential learning project that utilizes math, science, history, geography and creative writing to place education directly in the hands of students. By using collaborative problem solving and creative writing the students help the Robot make her way across North America. The project concludes with an actual space launch! That’s right the robot along with copies of the students stories and artwork will board a commercial rocket that is headed to the space station later this fall.
If you don’t know about Lance Weiler… you should!
Lance Weiler, visionary filmmaker and DIY distribution expert, gives an overview of his highly inventive and cutting-edge distribution strategy for second feature Head Trauma. Lance reveals how he used no cost online tools to create huge buzz around the movie and how he expanded the audience for his film through multimedia remix cinema events and Alternate Reality Games.
Reinventing reporting and “crowd-sourcing” your stories
This chain of newspapers is boldly striking out into digital territory that no other legacy media has ventured in (switching to free online tools and more), but I’m eager to consider how our station can adopt this idea:
Telling the Stories
A cornerstone of the Ben Franklin Project is the inclusion of everyone in the process. While project observers helped fill the toolshed, our audiences helped fill the websites and printed pages.
The Ben Franklin Project opens the process and allows everyone to participate at whatever level they are comfortable. Adhering to Journal Register’s digital first mission, the Ben Franklin Project will empower the audience – through use of free web-based tools (the list of which is still being finalized) – to determine on what stories our reporting and editing staff should be focusing their efforts. The audience – the news consumer – will no longer simply be the end user. By transforming the process the traditional “end user” will be put at the beginning of the process when she helps shape the newsgathering and participates in the newsgathering.
And the audience wasted no time in participating. The Perkasie News-Herald invited readers to a town hall meeting — a mix of old-school outreach and the new-school crowdsourcing approach. The Q-and-A session of the meeting served as a news meeting where residents requested stories on the local electric rates and the community’s pay-as-you-throw trash collection system. Reporters and editors still did the work but they knew from the time story assignments were conceived that these stories matter to the audience.
The News-Herald in Lake County asked readers to help extend the newsroom’s reach by covering more turf than the reporting team could do alone. Editors, using Facebook, asked followers to help the staff build a list of the most dangerous intersections in the coverage area. By asking the audience to collaborate the staff was able to collect dozens of suggestions within the first few hours of the Facebook post. Reporters cross-referenced the submissions with data obtained from police. The same worked for a series of stories on blighted properties in the area. Readers were asked to report blighted properties and the reporters then investigated.
The crowdsourcing not only ensures the stories are relevant to the readership but also provides greater depth and breadth to the report as the community — collaborating with reporters and editors — can help extend the reach of the newsroom.
Why Online Video Fails To Meet Its Lofty Expectations
Why Online Video Fails To Meet Its Lofty Expectations
With television advertising being a $70 billion market and total online advertising weighing in at $22.7 billion for 2009, you can’t help but wonder why online video advertising only represents a $1 billion market.
In fact, according to the IAB, video advertising grew from $734 million to $1.017 billion from 2008 to 2009 — or 38%. That’s not bad, but when you consider that total video consumption per month has soared from 10 billion videos in July 2008 to over 33 billion in December 2009 (or 230%), you wonder why the revenue growth hasn’t mimicked the viewership.
For sure, economics tend to trail consumer patterns. Moreover, the recession and advertising slump didn’t help either. And yes, the so-called experts might not be all-knowing either, after all.
I personally think there’s more to it than that.
The Genie is Out of the Bottle
In 2000, I worked at a search engine company. We gave away our search engines for free and sought to generate revenue via advertising. The Nasdaq crashed and took down the ad market, after which point we sought to collect licensing revenues for our technology. With the cat out of the bag, it was impossible to get people to pay for the product afterwards. Lesson learned: If you give something away for free, you can’t charge for it subsequently.CTD…
An argument that professional content will continue to dominate the audience’s attention and that the likely way it will be paid for is through ads. But will the ad revenue be enough to fund the programming we’re fond of? Maybe a reality show, but probably not Lost, or CSI.
Media Convergence and how to spend a rainy afternoon…
There is a fascinating organization at MIT that is working on media convergence that along with the Comparative Media Studies department organizes the futures of entertainment conferences and publishes dozens of podcasts of their colloquia here.
The topics are fantastic. Here is an example that takes on how the internet has challenged how storytellers (in this case writers) present their public and private selves to the world.
A rainy afternoon in front of the computer wouldn’t be complete without trolling the wonderful and provocative ideas that emerge at the TED talks. Clicking at random will always bring you something unexpected. Here’s an 18 minute one that blew me away tonight:
