some practical examples of how to use new technologies to tell stories

 roberto cuccu     

Stories can be told to entertain, to teach and also for the pleasure to communicate what one feels or knowes to others. Some web resources can even show how to create a story in collaboration with others. Moreover stories in digital form can be told in many different ways, from the comic book style, to the graphic novel with music and spoken dialogue or they can also be shaped in the form of an interactive game. The importance of a good script over a good animation technique is stressed, and some examples of digital stories are introduces and commented.

Over the years, Web sites have turned from static text and picture pages to dynamic multimedia environments, although most of the time animated with fly-out menus, little sparks flying around the screen while playing hi-fi music. This section of the magazine is not about that, but it is about using technology for telling stories. Stories can be told to simply entertain, but also to teach a moral, a lesson, to make you think or just for the pleasure to communicate what you feel to others. There's even the possibility to create them in collaboration with others .

Thanks to tecnology, stories can be told in many different ways: they can be told in the comic book style,
(http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/icst/index.html),or as online graphic novel with music and spoken dialogue (http://www.markclarkson.com/main.html); it can also be an interactive game, with characters waiting the player input to go on with their story
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/games/gunpowder/index.shtml) .

  clic on pictures

One of the purpose of this column is to stimulate educators and students to watch with new eyes the tons of animated material on the Web and think about the possibility to be themselves designers and producers of educational animated stories, or at least to better appreciate the potentialities of these forms of communication. Of course we don't need to have Disney cartoons as the model for our productions, as they are far too sophisticated for us. In fact it's also possible to produce an animated story with little movement at all (movement being the most technical part of the job), but outstanding because of its interesting style of narration, original setting, appropriate shots and a well constructed final climax scene.

Let's analyse three different kinds of digital animated narration, and see what we can learn from them.

Artist Scott Mc Cloud is the brilliant author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, two books that transcends the world of comics and taps into much deeper issues such as creativity, entertainment and others.
HTML Blues is an online comic from I Can't Stop Thinking, a collection of well designed comics which provide a forum for McCloud's ongoing speculations on digital comics - it could be defined a metacomics. Following his mazy reflections about the use of the Web to convey your ideas, we are also captured by the apparent simplicity of realization and effectiveness of the medium of communication.

  clic on picture

Teetering is an animated cartoon in black and white by Dave Jones (www.transcience.com.au). It's an amazing demonstration of how it is possible to create some low-band astonishing entertaining animation with surprisingly simple characters, no dialogue or music at all but some noises. If you leave apart the drawing skills of Jones, what we certainly appreciate in this story is the role of a good script in establishing the quality of the graphic story. The same story, drawn by a poorer drawer, would probably somehow still win us over, just because, as digital cartoonist Mark Clarkson (http://www.markclarkson.com ) suggests in his book about web cartoons, good writing generally triumphs over mediocre, or even bad animation; technically great animation, conversely, does not triumph over mediocre writing.
Also for this story, that has been inserted in the cover of this issue, if you want to see it just clic on the picture below.

  clic on pictures

Another kind of animation that could raise the interest of educators is the one that describes a process, be it scientific, historical or whatever.
The historical animations made up by the BBC, in the educational section of the online site, are certainly a good example of the kind.
They can also show how the "new technologies provide opportunities for creating learning environments that extend the possibilities of old - but still useful - technologies - books, blackboards, and linear, one-way communication media, such as radio and television shows - as well as offering new possibilities." ("How People Learn" , by National Research Council, National Academy Press, 2001).

In the learning environments designed by BBC to stimulate e develop historical understanding in young learners, the animations provide an opportunity to learn by doing, receiving feedback, refining one's understanding of past events and life, and build new knowledge. You can choose to explore the monarchs of England and the United Kingdom with an animated timeline, explore contemporary engravings of London's skyline before and after the Great Fire of London, see the expertise required to build an Iron Age roundhouse fit for a chief, see how people dressed in the last century and some five hundred years ago.

The animation Beam Engine illustrates a version of James Watt's steam engine - one of the inventions that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution-, how it works and it eventually offers the possibility to rebuild it piece by piece, to test the comprehensione of its functioning. This last activity can also be a useful means to develop visual memory and logical skills.

  clic on pictures

This is the first of a series of articles about digital story telling, contributions and suggestions and links to resources will be greatly appreciated.

roberto cuccu