Digital Storytelling

From Lakeinnovation.org

Glen tell stories through photos from the eyes of the children, kids take pictures; community museum with children as storytellers

Gbenga kids with stories that have been lost because there wasn't an opportunity to tell it; ebook, photos, videos, text

Oraztio tell a story from the organizations' perspective of the people we are serving, to encourage people to do more etc.

Luis want kids to share stories of experience with the organization, also share stories of their own; second part turns into supporting material for teachers and others about the importance of nature in childrens' lives

maybe it's two storytelling avenues, one for the kids and one for teachers/adults and kids techniques to start the storytelling process

Lena give cameras to members of the community to capture pieces of their life on their own; needs a lot of facilitation. you can't just give them a camera and say come back later. it needs to part of a process with the community. generating the images is very valuable. let the kids take photos, but then come back together and edit the photos, pick their favorite 25 and structure their own story, plus add captions. publish the stories on a collaborative blog. another technique is to have kids interview each other, gives them another perspective on the story and it can produce a more interesting story. audio and video usually need more time for editing, compressing, uploading, etc.

Downloading photos from phones is very hard because of the need for appropriate software that matches the phone, required cables, etc. Submitting photos to your site or elsewhere should be straight from the phone without a computer

Producing online video: 1. It is going to take time; it's very time consuming and resources intensive.

2. If it's longer than 10 minutes it is likely that you will not keep people watching and is also the maximum length of video YouTube will allow.

3. You need a decent microphone if you are going to be recording a meeting or conversation, the other sounds will be louder than the voices on the recording.

4. A lot of cheaply produced video is ruined by lighting, cameras need much more light than you think.

5. Videos that are shot from one angle are very boring, but if you do two cameras at the same time you will need to edit it together

Editing Video Option 1: use software that comes with your camera

Option 2: software that comes with your computer, MovieMaker (pc) or iMovie (mac) - still limited and handle short videos and so forth best

Option 3: mid-range software like Final Cut Express, a cheaper version of Final Cut Pro (doesn't matter how fancy your software is, you need to know how to edit video first; cheaper software is designed for people who don't do video professionally or do not have time to learn a lot about it)

Best Practices on digital storytelling

Blogs are the most flexible for storytelling because each post is one story that can contain photo, text, video, etc. Wordpress also lets you submit from a phone or email as well as web.

Capacity limits differ if you are self-hosting a blog or if you are hosted by someone else or another company. Same with Flickr, where you can upload 100mb of free space and then you'd need to pay.

YouTube is the most popular service, so a lot of people know how to use the system and it also exposes you to a huge audience so people could randomly find you.

Vimeo is preferred by people with higher quality video because it has a higher visual quality but you need more bandwidth to deal with it. Vimeo community is definitely smaller.

Witness.org works with human rights organizations, if your video is of a nonprofit or a social rights topic, they will host it for free.

There are many other platforms too: Check out WeAreMedia here

YouTube has two options: 1. You can brand your personal page 2. You can tell YouTube you are a nonprofit and you can get a Nonprofit Channel (Here's the YouTube form)

YouTube also has a standard format for subtitles so you can add subtitles for your videos.