Digital Storytelling - Development and Pioneers

Development and Pioneers

The broad definition has been used by many artists and producers to link what they do with traditions of oral storytelling and often to distinguish their work from slick or commercial projects by focusing on authorship and humanistic or emotionally provocative content. Digital Storytelling has been used by Ken Burns, in the documentary The Civil War, cited as one of the first models of this genre. In his documentary, Burns used first-person accounts that served to reveal the heart and emotions of this tragic event in American history, as well as narration, archival images, modern cinematography, and music (Sylvester & Greenidge, 2009). Some of the other artists who have described themselves as digital storytellers are the late Dana Atchley, his collaborator Joe Lambert, Abbe Don, Brenda Laurel, and Pedro Meyer.

The "short narrated films" definition of digital storytelling comes from a production workshop by Dana Atchley at the American Film Institute in 1993 that was adapted and refined by Joe Lambert in the mid-1990s into a method of training promoted by the San Francisco Bay Area-based Center for Digital Storytelling.

Typically, digital stories are produced in intensive workshops. The product is a short film that combines a narrated piece of personal writing, photographic and other still images, and a musical soundtrack. Technology enables those without a technical background to produce works that tell a story using "moving" images and sound. The lower processing and memory requirements for using stills as compared with video, and the ease with which the so-called "Ken Burns" pan effect can be produced with video editing software, have made it easy to create good-looking short films.

Digital storytelling was integrated into public broadcasting by the BBC's Capture Wales project. The following year a similar project was launched by the BBC in England titled Telling Lives. Sveriges Utbildningsradio created Rum för Berättande (Room for Storytelling). Netherlands Educational TV Teleac/NOT created a program with young people in Amsterdam. KQED, Rocky Mountain PBS, WETA and other public television stations in the US have developed projects.Digital storytelling is evolving from the simple narrated video to forms that are interactive and look better. These include websites and online videos created to promote causes, entertain, educate, and inform audiences.