IN THIS ISSUE of d S t o r y N e w s:

• IN THE NEWS: "Telling Tales" - Office.com
• dStory6 UPDATE: Cancellation News
• OP/ED: Has Digital Storytelling Succeeded As A Movement? By Joe Lambert
• FEATURED SITE: Oxygen.com (OurStories)
• CASE STUDY: Our Stories at Oxygen.com
• COOL TOOLS with Harry Marks: iMovie2: The Coolest Tool!

IN THE NEWS:
Office.com tells how multimedia technologies can turn customer testimonials into digital storytelling.

Jenny McCune interviewed a wide variety of creators of web-based digital stories including: Rocky Mountain Bicycles Ltd., Rolling Thunder Media, Coca-Cola, and J. Walter Thompson to show how they were using stories to strengthen their customer relationships.

Office.com's online site combines "content, commerce, community and communications to create the place we work when we work online. Original and aggregated content informs Office.com customers of industry trends, news and gossip in 16 Industries, 120 sub-Industries, and 10 Business Management focused areas."

Read the article

dStory6 UPDATE:
dStory6 2000 Cancellation

As visitors to our website have become aware, the 6th Annual Digital Storytelling Conference & Festival scheduled for November 28th to December 2nd in Monterey, CA has been cancelled. Attendees at dStory5 learned that Festival Director Dana Atchley was scheduled to undergo a bone marrow transplant in the summer of 2000. Dana underwent the procedure on July 18th with marrow donated by his sister. Both Dana and Festival Producer Denise Atchley had hoped to have an expanded team in place prior to this event. Unfortunately this was not possible, and we have sadly had to cancel this year's Conference & Festival. As of this Newsletter Dana is recovering well. We have no new dates to announce but will post updates on the website and in this Newsletter. Stay tuned!

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In 1994, a group of us sat around the table at Joe's Digital Diner talking like a bunch of conspirators about what it would mean if Digital Storytelling "got big." "Big" meant popular in both a societal and commercial sense, although none of necessarily defined our terms. It was more Dylanesque, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

We felt wind gathering in the sails of our little boat and we knew that this would effect careers, make money, and a few of us thought, change the world. Much has happened to all of us in those six years, and we now count hundreds if not thousands of new accomplices in our project and multiple centers of influence and dialogue around the same issues before our small group back in 1994.

For me, as both a participant and lay historian of many social and political movements in the 20th Century, I always thought of our work in Digital Storytelling as what we used to call, "movement building." That is, we wanted to motivate people to change their behavior, to change policy, to change the distribution of power and resources. As such, Digital Storytelling for us was more of an idea than a product, more effecting social behavior than consumer behavior. Not that the two are inseparable, quite the opposite, but the emphasis, for us, was on a simple notion - The tools of digital technology should be used to democratize voice and therefore empower more people than the prior set of analog tools in contemporary communication.

The populist emphasis of our notion of Digital Storytelling was shared by the vast number of people attracted to our work. After all, we were helping people tell their stories and that is an irresistibly positive experience for most everyone. And we were not alone. The early Internet culture had at its core a utopian premise; a new age of decentralized many-to-many distribution of information that was to conquer the dominant culture of media owned and distributed by the few controlling the information available to the teaming masses.

Since then, the dominant culture moved to the internet with tremendous force, both ignoring, attacking and co-opting large parts of idealistic concepts of the pioneer web communities. Democratizing impulses still abound, but like our dominant political culture they are mainly a sideshow, only occasionally demanding front-page attention, like the Seattle protests against the WTO in our larger culture or Napster in the Digital Culture.

In the midst of all this, has Digital Storytelling become a movement? Does it matter? I believe the notion of story, transformative reflection, and the capacities of computing machine being forged together into some sort of new life management process is catching on with people. The core value of this work is taking the time to make a story. Undoubtedly more people are telling their story because of digital technology, but their reasons for doing it, and the way they use the stories in their lives, may only have slightly been altered by the opportunities/advantages of digital appliances.

We still have much work to do. We still have to imagine a future where people value their own lives stories more than the constructed lives of sixteen faux "survivors" on a island in the Pacific. In other words, the movement has just begun. And certainly all the friends of the Digital Storytelling Festival are defining the movements' ideologies and values on the fly each and every day.

In the old days, we would just raise our left fist and say, Right On! So there, I'll say it. "Right On to all of you! and keep those stories being told!"

Contact Joe Lambert.

----- If you would like to respond or contribute an OP/ED piece to the dStory Newsletter please write to Dana Atchley.

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DSTORY FEATURED SITE: Oxygen.com Our Stories As digital storytellers we are in a transition era where only a small percentage of us are able to effectively use the new digital tools to tell our stories. The producers of OurStories at Oxygen.com have taken a unique and commendable approach to this problem by co-creating stories with their authors. They solicit stories and images from the Oxygen community and then assemble them using engaging Flash based animation at their production headquarters. The finished stories are posted online.

Read two of our favorites from the "OurStories" archives: An Embarrassing Moment: It Was just a Chocolate Easter Bunny and A Blind Date Disaster: The Two Bit Date.

Ed Note: We choose sites based on our interests, the site's level of support or implementation of digital storytelling, and just because we think they're great. If you would like to be considered for a dStory Featured Site, please send your URL to Dana Atchley

Joe Lambert interviews two of the producers of OurStories:
Dorelle Rabinowitz and Kimberly Mercado.

Joe- Whose idea was OurStories?

Kimberly- Kit Laybourne, who had been working on a number of the programming projects for the cable network, including the X-chromosome show, had a strong commitment to co-creation in the way Oxygen developed its media programming. Meaning Oxygen would take programming ideas from its audience, about subjects to address, about stories to cover, and so it made sense that there be a place on the website that encouraged women to share their stories, and to actually work with Oxygen.com in realizing their stories in the multimedia format.

Joe- Why did you decide to use Flash to tell these stories?

Dorelle- At first, they thought about doing QuickTime stories, this would include video and could be used both as web pieces and for broadcast. But for technical reasons, and for artistic reasons, the using of still images and animation to tell the story was much more effective, they decided on flash technology. As it turns out, the Flash pieces also work well in broadcast.

Joe- So OurStories was always a central to Oxygen.com, why do you think this important in the context of the women's audience?

Kimberly- OurStories was always part of the site. The co-creation aspect was considered specifically appealing to our audience. And we have seen how this has worked. Women are not only sending stories, but also sending topics for stories. And we have sought to make the topics and responses cover a wide range of concerns of women, from many different kinds of backgrounds or interests.

Joe- How do you gather and produce stories?

Dorelle- First, we post a topic and call for submissions. Women then send in their stories and Kimberly and I read through them and decide which one would make a great story. People often have many different ideas about what a story is, sometimes it is a brief anecdote, other times advice or discussion, and sometimes a story.

Kimberly- And while we usually make the topics, co-creation means that sometimes the audience chooses the topics as well. For example, people wanted embarrassing stories, and I tried to avoid it for a while, but we finally caved in. So we ran the topic of Embarrassing stories, and 40-50 stories came in, and looking through them we made a connection with a specific story. So then we contact the contributor via email, and tell them we are interested in speaking with them about producing the story, and set up a phone call. We then explain the process, and if they agree, we FedEx them a package with a mini-disk, and a roll of film, notes and releases, and then work with them to decide which images need to be taken and coach them a little of how to record the voiceover.

Dorelle- Then all the material comes back to us, and we storyboard the story, decide which animations and other graphics or effects we are going to add to the story, and then produce it in Flash.

Kimberly- The whole process can take about four weeks. I am working with about two months lead time as a producer to think about current events, holidays or subjects timed to the year, and Dorelle animates one Flash project each week.

Read entire interview at the Center for Digital Storytelling Site.

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COOL TOOLS with Harry Marks
iMovie2 : The Coolest Tool!
Instant gratification for $50 (or for free)! Plus a really useful tip!

Do you have a video camera? Do you shoot home movies? If you're like me, you shoot everything, then come home with hours of boring footage and hours of video of your feet when you forgot to turn off your camera. You watch it once, realize that showing it to anybody would be too embarrassing, so you stick it on a shelf and forget it.

It's almost a certainty that in those hours of shelved video, there are some wonderful moments. All you need is a simple way to extract those little gems and string them together into a short story that you'll watch over and over again, and probably be proud enough of your work to actually show it to others. Well, if you happen to have any Macintosh that's DV (digital video) capable, and a digital video camera–you're in luck.

iMovie was the first digital editing application specially designed to give beginning moviemakers the power to create compelling stories from their digital video footage. Let's call them "digital stories". Simple as it was it hooked a lot of us high-end users. For the quick capture, assembly and output of simple digital stories, this was a groundbreaking application. I became totally enamored with this little application which came free with all DV Macs. It worked so well that I was able to teach kids and adults alike to turn out respectable broadcast quality productions in a couple of days. But iMovie had some real limitations. Now the limits have been opened up.

With iMovie2 those limits have been removed adding some amazing new tools and features that give much greater control and creative freedom. Its intuitive tools let you transfer clips to and from your digital camcorder, edit and arrange them into stories, enhance them with very sophisticated Hollywood-style transitions and animated titles, and even add music and visual effects. You can view your finished movies on your monitor, post them to the web, or send them to friends and family via email. Best of all, from my point of view, you can save them back to your camera with no loss of quality (hey–it's digital!) and then watch them, all edited, titled and music scored, on your TV. This way you have a master tape from which you can make copies to any other format to send to your family and friends. After all, everybody has a VHS! Plus–using Apple's iTools, you can publish your iMovie on the web for free!

iMovie2 is now available for download from Apple for fifty bucks. If you bought a DV capable Mac recently it probably came with your machine. If you have any machine with built-in FireWire, you're DV capable. If you bought your machine before iMovie2 came out, spend the $50 and download it. It's one of the great bargains of the western world!

iMovie2 doesn't have a manual because you don't need one, but there's plenty of help built in and the iMovie community is growing fast. You learn by doing, and once you've tried a couple of digital stories with iMovie2, you'll never look at television or movies the same way again. You'll start to understand the editing process, the way visual stories are put together, the way they're constructed and paced. As you can see, I'm over the top on this application.

A TIP FOR CURRENT USERS

One of the sticky points in iMovie2 is the fact that when you crop a clip to the length you want, the parts that you trim off are basically gone. There's a way to restore your video clip provided you haven't emptied your clip trash. Emptying your clip trash from time to time frees up valuable disk space. So what happens if you've emptied your trash and you find that you've trimmed a clip to short? You can, of course, go back and recapture the clip again from the camera. It's easy, but sometimes inconvenient.

Try this. If there's a clip on your iMovie2 shelf that you're undecided about in terms of cropping, drag it into the time line while holding down the Option-key. The clip appears in the timeline, but it's also still on the shelf! Holding down the Option-key makes a copy of the clip. If you don't like the changes you've made to it in the timeline, you still have a pristine copy of it on the shelf. And remember, unlike the first version, iMovie2's shelf space is unlimited! Naturally the usual Apple commands work perfectly, so you can cut, copy and paste clips, music cues, and sound effects ad infinitum. I just find the Option-key a very useful way of covering myself.

Be sure to visit Apple's iMovie web page, there's a wealth of information there plus some good freebies to download. Happy iMoviemaking!

http://www.apple.com/imovie/ http://www.apple.com/applemasters/imoviekids/
http://www.apple.com/applemasters/imovie/ http://homepage.mac.com/harrym/imovie.html
http://www.bathrobeproductions.com/harrymarks/

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Dana Atchley Productions is the pioneer resource for digital storytelling offering wide range of creative services and consultation as well as hands-on workshops. It is also your source for Next Exit, Dana Atchley's interactive storytelling performance.

For further information Contact:

Denise Atchley
dStoryNEWS
3435 Cesar Chavez Street, Studio 221
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-285-4383