The launch of Community Voices projects is drawing nearer. Organisations will be invited to submit their projects for funding by The Media Trust early in the new year. I was interviewed by one the researchers from Corporate Citizenship who compiled the report that informs the approach to be taken by Media Trust towards the Community Voices project. It’s good to see that Digital Storytelling features in the report.

It is my intention be as fully involved in Community Voices as is practical, hoping to bring to the project my conviction that storytelling can be an important factor in digital inclusion. I am therefore pleased to able to offer support in any way I can, including displaying the project’s logo and links on my sites. If you want to know more just click on the logo or the links.

Digital Story Telling

Digital storytelling, the technique of combing narrative with digital media, into short movies emerged as a practice in the 1990s.  The technique exploited the increasing accessibility of technologies for capturing audio and images and was exploited particularly for community and social projects.  It can be seen as an adaptation of the storytelling tradition which has existed for more than 6,000 years (Abrahamson, 1998).  Digital stories have been described by The Digital Storytelling Association (http://www.dsaweb.org/) as “the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling”;. Meadows (2003) identifies it as a social practice, telling stories with easily accessible low-cost technology.

via Digital Story Telling.

There are some useful references at the end of this short article from the Centre for Active Learning at Gloucester University

Now it’s driving me to distraction – it’s so inconsistent. So my write up will take a bit longer than I’d hoped. On the whole, at this stage, I’m disappointed with iMovie 8. Transitions make a mess of timings, fine editing is tedious and too many numbers have to be typed into boxes when dragging a clip edge should do the job. More later – hopefully with fewer grumbles …… or perhaps I just need to lock myself away in a darkened room to calm down and wish for a bug fix in Snow Leopard for iMovie HD.

When Apple rewrote iMovie for iLife 08 it presented a host of problems for digital storytellers. The most obvious one is the total lack of a timeline in the conventional video editing style. It can be pressed into use for digital storytelling but for a new user there is a serious lack mouse functions for stills. Almost all of the digital stories told in my workshops are told by beginners using still images. Things improved  in iLife 09 but not enough for me to start using it over the HD version.

Building Affected for Life? in Photo to Movie

Last month someone alerted me to Photo to Movie. A package written specifically for still images. It has a timeline and is capable of creating something more sophisticated than a simple slideshow by the use of highly configurable zoom and pan functions. It integrates quite well with iTunes and iPhoto, and so things looked hopeful as I read the help files and absorbed the basic functions. There are also Mac and Windows versions. But would it live up to my hopes?

So I took the tutorial section of my digital story Affected for Life? that I use in all of my workshops. It’s a section that employs most of the basic effects that I teach. It’s very easy, when you know exactly how the story and images fit together to start at the beginning and build the story from left to right on a timeline and end up with a polished product in a short time. Photo to Movie allowed me to do this quite simply. The basic slide show was finished in no time at all. But, most digital stories are not as well rehearsed as my tutorial. Images need to be added and removed; durations shortened and lengthened; effects added and removed, all without upsetting the basic timing of the images which have been carefully placed to appear at a specific word or even syllable.  Going through the editorial process is what really tests a piece of software.

This is what I found when I started hacking at my slideshow.

To replace an image in iMovie HD, click on it and then “show photo settings”. Delete the image and then drag the new image from the media browser to take it’s place in the timeline. It will pick up all the attributes of the image just deleted.  In Photo to Movie, ctrl-click the image in the timeline and select “replace photo …” At this point a finder window opens in the Pictures folder, not the media browser which is where all my images are stored. So I was unable to tell if a replacement image would work like iMovie HD. A new photo dropped from the media browser (ie iPhoto) into the timeline is given only the default settings. This is a process that is repeated many times in the storytelling process which is why this limitation is a concern.

The Photo to Movie timeline

There’s no way of selecting all the images on the Photo to Movie timeline and moving them along it together. In fact the only way of moving everything down the timeline is to insert a blank image at the start. There is a handy “insert blank image” function to do this easily, which is also critical because there isn’t a fade to black transition. I had to insert a blank image and set up a cross dissolve in and out of it to create a fade to black, fade from black transition.

All images in Photo to Movie are allocated a series of default keyframes, preset for standard zooming (Ken Burns Effect). The default can be set for no effect but the keyframes remain. I found they “got in the way” of setting image duration. eg When I shortened a clip the time between the last and previous keyframe was shortened. The rest remained at the same place. Changing one of the keyframes inside the image also changed the duration of the clip and hence the relative timing of all subsequent images on the timeline. I would prefer keyframes that moved relative to the clip duration, or at least the option to work that way, if the current arrangement is important to other slideshow creators. I found the whole process so irritating that it was a deal breaker for me. The timeline is quite fiddly and I couldn’t imagine some of my workshop participants clicking their mouse pointers and dragging at the right place. Control of zooming and panning in an image is much more comprehensive than in iMovie but also more complicated. I would have preferred a better range of options elsewhere and fewer zooming choices.

Transitions in Photo to Movie are created by overlapping images, a process which again disturbs the timing in the rest of the timeline. In iMovie HD there are transitions that retain the timing. Also there’s no slip editing function. For me allowing adjustments and effects that retain the initial timing of images in the timeline is very important to new learners. It’s frustrating for them to be constantly rearranging images after trying out a creative idea. They often just sit tight and stop developing their story preferring to live with what they have.

timing in fractions of seconds

I also noticed that the timeline is calibrated in seconds and fractions of a second when we all know that conventionally video is timed in seconds and frames.

At this stage I am sceptical about the suitability of Photo to Movie as the main workshop tool for my digital storytellers so as a comparison I switched over to the new iMovie 8 and built my tutorial film in there. Despite it’s shortcomings (watch this space for a similar review) I felt more comfortable about teaching it’s functions to new users. I’m sure there are many users who are delighted with Photo to Movie but I don’t think it’s for me at this stage.

Why am I doing this? Well iMovie HD is no longer available and under Snow Leopard has a fatal bug in the way the app previews still images in the timeline. There are workarounds BUT who knows what will be the next bug/flaw that emerges as the operating system grows away from a much loved but unsupported application? It will soon be time to move on.

I’ve just uploaded the final batch of digital stories made by Engineers in the Engenious Stories project. It was organised by The Universities of Salford and Southampton and funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering. I held workshops in Salford, Bradford, York, Birmingham and Southampton where a wide range of people told an equally varied selection of stories.

In addition, school children at Bittern Park School in Southampton created stories which have been used internally although not published.

I have watched all of these stories as they have been uploading and they are, as always, even better for watching them again. My personal thanks to all of the participants for their hard work in making these digital stories and now I hope they will inspire young people, and some not so young, to consider a career in engineering. As someone who began life as a Broadcast Technician with the BBC I was not a little envious of the work these people have devoted their lives to. Whilst I was taking a path of journalism and broadcasting they were solving engineering problems and turning ideas into practical solutions. We all make our choices, but I can still look longingly at a path I might have followed if other callings hadn’t come my way. Running these workshops reminded me that I still get a buzz from science and technology.

Please go to the digistoriesuk YouTube channel and watch these stories.

I’m testing this software for use in my workshops. It’s available in Mac and Windows versions. There’s a timeline and it works under Snow Leopard. With no sign of a fix for iMovie 6 under Snow Leopard and the download no longer available on the Apple website, I have to do something. So what are the choices?

iMovie ‘09 – limited still image functions

Final Cut Express 4 – complicated for first time users

Photo to Movie – under test

If you have any experience of using this software or suggestions of other software I would value hearing about it.

Culture Shock records ordinary lives in North East

By Culture24 staff | 28 October 2009

(Above) Culture Shock participants editing their digital story. Photograph courtesy Culture Shock

A project in the North East is allowing local people to contribute records of their own lives to the permanent collections of the region’s museums and galleries.

Culture Shock aims to help visitors create 1,000 ‘mini-movies’ in the course of some 100 digital storytelling workshops.

via Culture Shock records ordinary lives in North East | Culture24.

• Diego Goldberg :: The Arrow of Time – I find these family photo collection fascinating. The same day each year they photograph themselves. It reminds me of the film Dana Atchley used to show in Next Exit.