Digital Storytelling Reflection

 

The finished WordPress

The idea for the 15 Minute News Hour first came up in the intensive when he had to pitch our ideas to each other and split up into groups. I’m very interested in audio production for radio and had the vague notion of doing some sort of satirical comedy podcast. Chiara is heavily involved in community radio with SYN and was interested in collaborating as well, and Josh liked the idea enough to make it a trio.

Initially we shared influences to get a clearer idea of what the project would be like. These included the old BBC radio series Blue Jam, as well as podcasts like Nightvale and Superego, which use surreal scripting and audio SFX to great effect. We decided on the format of a fifteen-minute fake news broadcast, like a parody of an hourly news bulletin on a radio station. Our influences also gave us a path to follow in terms of social media use and distribution, in terms of how and where to host and submit the podcast, which channels to use, and the importance of having “own” domain or platform—we ended up getting a WordPress with extra content on it, meant to be the digital “hub” for the project.

Our workflow followed a basic media production structure. We had a pre-production stage, of preparing scripts and planning timelines, getting together ideas of how we would host and distribute the project, as well as sourcing voice actors, background music and SFX. Our production stage was the recording itself—probably the quickest and most painless stage for us. Post-production involved the editing of the podcast, as well as creating platforms to host and distribute it.

In the early stages, we were able to collaborate effectively across the Internet. Scripting was done on a shared Google Doc that everyone could peruse and edit. A secret Facebook group was useful for organizing ourselves and delegating work, and served another purpose in that we weren’t able to procrastinate from doing work by checking our Facebook! A few key stages of the process did require us to be in same room—the recording session, in RMIT’s radio studios, as well as the group edit session in RMIT’s editing suites. Due to the limited availability of these resources, as well as our busy schedules, we were able to minimize the team spent using these facilities by planning effectively and comprehensively over the Internet beforehand.

A happy snap of the recording session at RMIT studios

A project like 15 Minute News Hour would not have been possible without digital tools. We recorded straight to a digital audio file and were able to edit it by transferring the file across different computers using Adobe Audition. All of the sound effects and music tracks we used were copyleft materials obtained from Internet archives, so we didn’t have to spend any time or effort composing and producing our sounds. When it came time to distribute the podcast, we were able to use free hosting on Soundcloud to put the file up and share it around. We were also able to get consistent designs, logos and banners to use across our social media platforms by using Canva, an outstanding free web-based design app that I will definitely be using again for its intuitive interface.

The social media channels we ended up using were Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Soundcloud and Spreaker—at the time of writing we had submitted our podcast to be hosted on the iTunes Store but hadn’t heard back. Facebook and Twitter are almost obligatory, being the most widely-used ways to distribute content, connect with audiences and gauge popularity and success of a project. Both platforms are also based on the idea of chronological updates, which works well with the fake news aesthetic of 15 Minute News Hour as we were able to write fake funny news headlines which gave us some extra content to put on these platforms. Our WordPress was our hub and our ‘own’ space where we were able to customize the design and make a fake news website to go along with our fake news podcast—this was a lot of fun and again, provides extra content to users who decide to check it out. Soundcloud was the easiest audio hosting service and is used for many podcasts, and it also enabled us to tag our podcast and connect it to an audio listening community. The Soundcloud interface also allowed us to embed the podcast easily into our other platforms like Facebook and WordPress. Spreaker is a hosting community for radio broadcasters and podcasts and hosting our podcast there enabled us to connect with that community as well.

LINKS:
15 Minute News Hour
15 Minute Facebook15 Minute Twitter
15 Minute Soundcloud
15 Minute Spreaker

A banner made using Canva

Overall, I was pleased with the relatively painless process of production and collaboration that we went through making 15 Minute News Hour. Considering the constraints we had in terms of time, availability and resources, I think we did a good job. If I were to do the project again, in an ideal world, I would spend more time on the production stage itself—doing more takes and making sure we directed the vocal performances exactly as we wanted them. As we were using volunteer voice actors and only had a two-hour session, we didn’t have this luxury.

 

Creative Suburbs: Review

Another group of my classmates grouped together to help out local organization Creative Suburbs for their digital storytelling assignment.

They made a Prezi slideshow explaining the various facets of their project (and there’s a few of them!)

A screenshot of the Creative Suburbs promotional strategy

Creative Suburbs is a cool concept—a platform for people’s local community ideas to become reality. For their digital storytelling assignment, Karen, Patrick and Trang came up with what is basically a PR campaign—objectives, target audiences, key messages etc. Very impressive, and a useful tool for a grassroots initiative.

Their campaign operated on a few fronts. They made a promotional video for the website, explaining what Creative Suburbs is all about. The video is visually dynamic, succinct and clearly explains what the platform does, giving examples all the way—something I would want for my own company, if I was running one!

The soundscape and QR codes are a fantastic way of utilising space and location in the campaign. Capturing the ‘sounds’ of a space, rather than just a photo, leads the audience to consider location from a new angle. The QR codes invite engagement with the project in a tangible, physical way, taking the promotion out of the Internet ether and linking it firmly to the real world. This is particularly appropriate when promoting a platform that aims to rejuvenate, develop and utilize the very community spaces that these QR codes would be located in.

The team’s Google Places map

The Google Places map the team developed is interactive, informative and easy to use on Google’s Maps platform. It gives a quick, intuitive demonstration of what Creative Suburbs have done across Melbourne and, again, is particularly appropriate for an organization based on reconsidering and revamping physical locations.

To be honest, I can’t find much at fault with this team’s project. They’ve produced a range of digital media that exemplify their client’s principles, are interactive in a variety of ways, and clearly explain to the user what Creative Suburbs do—fulfilling all objectives.

The Aussie Affair: Review

The Aussie Affair is another digital storytelling project from my CMWP classmates—this one in the form of a short documentary on YouTube about the experiences of our international students.

I liked the premise straight away—too often international students aren’t given a “voice”, and by making a documentary where the audience hears directly from them about their experiences, the project was fulfilling one of the main goals of non-fiction storytelling.

The video was also well-produced. All of the interview subjects were well-framed against a variety of different backdrops. The “B-roll” footage was also a great idea, with shots of the streets around the Melbourne CBD providing a different take on the Australian experience of international students, as opposed to the stereotypes of kangaroos and koala bears!

In terms of constructive criticism, I felt like the introduction to the video could have been shorter—it takes over a minute to get going, and the opening shots from the tram could have been trimmed down, especially as many people do not even watch YouTube videos longer than 5 minutes in today’s attention-span-challenged society!

And this is not really a “criticism” but I believe that the premise for The Aussie Affair is good enough to last through a series of short videos, examining the ongoing issues in the lives of international students. There is definitely scope for expansion in this digital storytelling project!

Megatron the Stinkbutt: A Review

I really enjoyed my classmate Alex’s digital storytelling project, and not just because I’m a dog-lover.

Megatron the Stinkbutt is a digital comic, made from manipulated images of Alex’s pet dog. As such it brought together a few of my favourite things—cute doggies and webcomics!

The comics are short, sharp and to the point. The comic aesthetic is used beautifully, with classic Spiderman-style dialogue boxes and paneling, and the wry, tongue-in-cheek tone brings to mind Garfield or Calvin & Hobbes from a Sunday paper.

A screenshot of Alex’s comic as I saw it on Medium

The comics are spread across Tumblr and Medium. I was a bit conflicted about this approach for distribution. On the one hand, they look great on Medium, one of the best platforms for original content on the Internet. On the other hand, I feel like the comic could have been better served by having its own space—an original artist making quality comics (like Alex) should have their own space for their work. For example, popular comics like Achewood or XKCD have their own domains where everything can be controlled and bent to fit their aesthetic—they have their own platform rather than being published via Tumblr or Medium.

Those examples are comics professionals with well-established fanbases willing to contribute to pay server costs, so its very understandable why Alex would distribute Megatron across other content platforms for a university project. If this was an ongoing project, though, I would recommended spending the time/money to construct her own site for hosting comics.

 

Digital Drawing

My Adobe Illustrator session

I am not a natural artist—I am a bad drawer and struggle to think visually. As such I found the digital drawing process difficult and frustrating, and never really got beyond playing around with shapes.

I don’t have access to a tablet and stylus so was using my laptop’s trackpad, which is perhaps not ideal. I also didn’t have a clear image in my mind of what I wanted to draw which might have helped—at the very least I could have Googled YouTube how-tos.

I ended up messing around with layers, which I’ve had some experience with using GIMP, and bitmap drawing using the brush tool and changing the properties of the stroke. It was very basic but I was able to use the trackpad to draw a rudimentary cartoon face and then give it a beige skin tone.

A cartoon face using bitmap drawing

Although it’s not really for me, after experimenting with vector drawing for a while I could understand why the possibilities of digital drawing are exciting for artists. The ability to play around with the physics and perspectives of lines in relatively intuitive ways would make for simple digital animation for a web app or game. If I had the time or inclination to spend on it, I’m sure in the long run digital drawing would be easier, quicker, better-looking and more manipulable than the traditional hand-drawn Looney Tunes style.

I was able to quickly find an example of a gorgeous-looking digital painting animation. Its likely that this was done by a single person in their spare time at home, unthinkable even ten or fifteen years ago. Their technique is something to aspire towards.

As a lifelong fan of comics and cartoons, the flipped lecture on digital drawing has also given me a look “behind the curtain” at how some of my favourite web comics have been made. I’d always assumed the clean lines, colours and dialogue boxes in Achewood were digital somehow, but now I have an idea of how the whole process might have worked—a bitmap, hand-drawn with stylus and pad, traced over using layers, and then digitally manipulated for even line length and consistency.

An example of the art of Achewood. CREDIT: Chris Onstad

 

Audio Editing Thoughts

My Audition Window

Audio editing is probably the area of digital editing that I have the most experience with. I have a background in community radio and have used basic audio editing software to prepare highlights clips for shows I have produced for, and have also worked on podcasts and prerecorded segments that have been cleaned up and prepared in software like Audacity and Adobe Audition.

For my purposes I prefer to use simpler software—a few years ago it was Audacity, but I have found recent versions of Adobe Audition to be more effective and have a greater range of features. GarageBand has perfectly acceptable audio editing capabilities and a cleaner simpler interface, but I prefer to use it for producing stock music and SFX—as all the audio samples are royalty-free, it resolves any copyright headaches, and is intuitive and easy-to-use even for someone who isn’t musically-trained or a professional audio engineer.

As an example of the differences between the software, the following segment was used on community radio and was pre-recorded in a radio studio, before being cleaned up and mastered on Audition, with the intro and outro music bumpers created using royalty-free stock audio clips from GarageBand.

My mantra for audio editing has become “you can’t polish a turd”. No matter how much of a whiz you are in the editing stage, if your source material audio hasn’t been recorded well or is distorted and fuzzy, you’re going to end up with a bad product. As a result, I prefer my audio editing work to be as simple, clean and natural as possible. It’s better to spend more time planning the pre-production stage, securing appropriate locations and equipment to record clean and usable audio, rather than spending longer in the editing stage trying to fix your mistakes.

My Platonic ideal of audio editing is the cult BBC radio series Blue Jam. Produced in the late 90s, it blends ambient music and absurdist comedy sketches into a surreal, dreamlike programme. The high production values make it hard to tell when one segment or song has ended and the other begun, an utterly seamless editing job that, for me, is the pinnacle of clean, unobtrusive editing.

 

Playing Around With GIMP

My Gimp Window

I’ve spent the last hour or so playing around with GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) and reading the flipped lecture on digital image editing.

I’ve had GIMP on my computer for quite a while now, but never really used it beyond the most basic image cropping and resizing features. I’m not a very visually-oriented person and haven’t done much work with digital images, so anything more complicated than the old Microsoft Paint tends to confuse and frustrate me!

For me, then, GIMP is a natural choice for comprehensive image editor. Compared to Adobe Photoshop, it has the advantage of being free, which is great for an amateur dabbler like myself. It’s also open source, which is a principle that is more and more important to me as I find out more about Creative Commons and the copyleft movement. Plus, there is a huge community out there providing support like tutorials and troubleshooting—the official GIMP site has their own tutorial section and there are also fan sites like Gimpology that provide tips, tricks and advice.

As a beginner to digital image editing, one issue has become apparent straight away—the distinction between knowing how to do what you want, and actually knowing what you need to do. I am still at the early stage of learning the principles of photography and images, and the technical ways to refer to different elements of the image. Without this theoretical background, technical expertise is somewhat hollow—there’s no point having a whole range of options and features if you don’t really know which one to use to get the visual effect you want!

Hopefully, with practice, experience and a bit of help from online tutorials, as well as the theoretical training I’m getting at uni, I will quickly be able to develop my skills at digital image editing.

This site outlines a proposed ‘workflow’ for photo editing, an ordered process to go through to maximise efficiency and effectiveness. While I’m not quite at this level yet, hopefully it won’t be long before my process is as refined as this.

 

First Kiss

“I had my first kiss over there. Well, sort of. It was right there, on that bench. I guess I was about eleven, or twelve, something like that. It was Shelly Johnson. Everyone’s got their own Shelly Johnson. I was crazy about her, didn’t even really know why. I don’t think you ever love someone like you do when you’re a kid. We used to walk home from school together and then one recess one of her friends told me she liked me, like liked me, you know? And I thought, well this is my chance. So we’re walking home as usual and giggling about something and I just said, well, let’s go into the park, and she says okay, so we go into the park and, I dunno, we sit down on the bench? I had no idea what I was doing. And then we stop talking and there’s a silence and there’s no one else around. My heart’s beating like bom-bom-bom and my palms are sweaty. And I thought, this is it, right? So I just close my eyes and poke my lips out and lean in and WHACK! I headbutted her. Right in the face. My first kiss, with Shelly Johnson, and she’s crying on the ground with blood just pouring out of her nose. I tried to say sorry but, I mean, what can you do? She didn’t say anything—just ran home, didn’t even look back. At school she ignored me, walked home a different way. Probably put her off boys for years. I wonder what she’s up to?”

Apps

A screenshot of an individual user’s apps.

App is short for application, and essentially it refers to a software application—a digital program that does something.

With the increasing use of smartphone and tablet technology, app has come to refer to simple, narrow-focused software designed to be used on operating systems across different devices. There are also web apps, accessed via browsers and typically employing Javascript or other programming languages to create interactive online programs.

As opposed to traditional software found on desktop computers, apps tend to be simple, focused on a narrow range of functions, and have highly-intuitive interfaces, often making extensive use of the actual physical interaction of touchscreen smartphones and tablets. Apps perform a wide-range of functions—from games to daily organizers to bank account access.

Most apps are free or very cheap, and require little commitment in terms of time or money on the consumer’s part, an aesthetic leaning probably based on fragmented attention spans of people using smartphones or tablets on the go. Most apps are based around a simple idea, presented in a clean intuitive way. For example, Angry Birds is a popular app that riffs on the same addictive physics game, with visually-exciting presentation. There is also the notion that smartphones and tablets have opened up software to demographics that weren’t previously as engaged with computer technology—apps are essentially software that has been simplified and made intuitive for people who are not as tech-savvy, for example, older demographics that might use an iPad feel more comfortable using the touchscreens in a tactile way than using a mouse and keyboard to manipulate a GUI.

Apps can make revenue through ads, or in the case of something like Candy Crush, by offering extra features to users who pay more. Many companies will create an app for free as a sort of loss-leader to encourage people to use their services. For example, most banks have created free apps allowing their account holders to do basic banking on their smartphones, and many publications also create apps allowing people to access their content on the go. A video game like Grand Theft Auto V also had an app that complemented and expanded upon the world of the PS3 and XBox versions of the game.

A screenshot of Apple’s App Store

Making apps

Rather than investing time and money into making an app from scratch with no guarantee of return, the best way to approach apps might be to work from an existing source code. Sites like Chupamobile allow app developers to buy and sell the rights to source codes for apps. By working from an existing source code and modifying it for an app’s particular needs, you can minimize the time and effort required to produce a good app.

As apps are often not too complex, app development companies can often be hired to do the hard programming. A site like iBuildApps can make simple apps for a business, virtually for free. Due to their uncomplicated, simple aesthetic, a good app is more reliant on a good idea than it is on complicated programming —the initial concept is just as important as the execution.

E-books

The Amazon Kindle e-book reader on the left, and an older reader, the Softbook, on the right. CREDIT: Flickr user Steve Jurvetson, licensed via Creative Commons

The term e-book essentially means electronic book—any book existing in digital form as an encoded file. These files can be printed, read on a screen, or increasingly, downloaded onto a specially-designed e-book reader.

There are obvious advantages to e-books in terms of sustainable use of resources. E-books eliminate the physical costs associated with hard copy books, such as ink, paper or manufacturing time. Once an e-book file has been created it can be reproduced ad infinitum, lowering the cost of production to the publisher and by extension the cost to the reader, as well as conserving resources such as paper. Avid readers can also save space—entire bookcases can be contained easily on a single hard drive. And rare or hard-to-find physical books can be downloaded from the Internet, whenever it suits the reader—no more complaining about there being nothing to read!

E-books also have a “flattening” effect on the traditional hierarchy of the publishing industry—they make self-publication a far more viable option financially, and harness the democratizing capabilities of Internet distribution for books as they have previously been harnessed for other media such as films and music.

And, as coding languages improve and become more powerful, e-books will be able to present books in new ways. Animated GIFs or high-resolution colour pictures could be reproduced in e-books for minimal cost. An e-book produced for a school course could contain external links to more information, accessible via the internet. Cookbooks could include short how-to videos. Choose-your-own-adventure fantasy novels could even use the touchscreen capabilities of the iPad to have the reader physically interact with the e-book to make choices.

There is an intangible but significant perceived downside to e-books—the loss of the familiar, tactile nature feature of hardcopy books. People enjoy books as physical objects, and in the hundreds of years since the printing press, a cultural familiarity and fondness for paper books has developed. People’s eyes are accustomed to the written word on a paper page, and are used to turning pages, flicking pages back and forth, even folding pages over or inserting a bookmark to mark a spot.

An Amazon Kindle inside a moleskine. CREDIT: Flickr user Terry Madeley, licensed via Creative Commons

The designers of e-book readers have responded to this by trying to make e-book readers more similar to books, rather than computers. The popular Amazon Kindle, for example, is not backlit like a laptop but has a natural appearance that a reader can look at for hours without discomfort. They are also light, a convenient lightweight size, and have intuitive controls for turning pages (a simple button press, accompanied by an animated simulation of a real page turning).

Making e-books

While producing and distributing an e-book is easier than the traditional printing process, it still has a few technical requirements to get around. Chief among these is the difference in file formats. The EPUB format is an open format used by Apple and many other readers, such as those made by Sony. The Kindle used a proprietary Kindle format. The PDF format is open and usable with Apple’s iOS as well as Android, but is designed more for printing than reading and isn’t a ‘true’ e-book experience.

E-books can also be ‘standard’ format, allowing the reader to change font size and settings when reading the book, or ‘fixed layout’, where the reader cannot control these options for the page is displayed—this is more important for picture-heavy e-books where the content needs to be displayed in a certain way to have the desired impact on the reader.

Outsourcing might be the most effective way to actually create an e-book. Many services—such as Lulu and Smashwords—can take a Word document prepared by an author and convert it into an EPUB file. These services then distribute this e-book in their online stores or through popular sellers Apple and Amazon for a small fee. Programs like Calibre or Kindlegen can also convert digital text into e-book format that can be distributed through e-book marketplaces. Pages, a text-editing program for Apple iOS, can also save files as EPUB files for a rudimentary, text-based ebook.  Savvy HTML coders could even code their own EPUB file, although this takes more technical expertise.