Reflection 7: What is Digital Story?

Storytelling has been around for decades, since the world first began. The first stories were told by the cavemen; they would draw in their caves animals and draw themselves hunting and all the different weapons they created and the different animals that existed at that time. Storytelling then progressed to word of mouth; where a story would be told and then passed on to some one else, then someone else and so on. We now live in the year 2010 and storytelling has some a long way. The most modern art of storytelling is a digital story. Digital storytelling uses images such as pictures, music or singing, speaking using voice or talking just like a narrator giving personal experiences, naming characters and situations and details. Digital storytelling does not only refer to movies or TV shows, but more mainly a story told from the use of technology. The tools of digital technology are usually used to change voices and can make the story more interesting or funny or manipulate the voice with the technology as you wish it. There are different programs that you can use to do digital stories such as flash media player, Photoshop lets you distort and create images how you want them to look, and a very popular and easy program is Windows Movie maker. PowerPoint is a very useful tool not only for presentations and such but it can also help you tell stories. Many people don’t want everything to be digital so they can create there story in PowerPoint and be the narrator in person. Do you remember those old really big video cameras? Well as technology moves on, we no longer use tapes from those video cameras, everything is now transferred to DVD’s. There are programs that let you convert your tape home movies into DVD or you can easily go to a digital store and they can do it for you. Once your video is in a DVD you can use digital programs to use your video as a digital story. You can stop the video when you want it and you can add images or voice, you can even do a new recording and place it right after the shot you showed and speak about it. This is a great method of making your own digital story. Through digital storytelling you can story tell through visual aspects and although original storytelling was through word of mouth and drawings, you are now combining the two with special effects that can help you make a digital story all your own.