DTC 354 - Digital Storytelling

Course Projects

5 Story Summaries (5%)

Write 5 short-story summaries (100–300 words) within the 5 genre/styles from the list below. These will be projects you might like to pursue as digital stories in this class.

  1. A story in the Classical Aristotelian 3-part structure
  2. A story in Kishōtenketsu 4-part structure
  3. A story in an episodic structure
  4. A story in a surrealist or fantastic mode
  5. A personal anecdote as a fictional story

Diagrammatic Narrative (10%)

This assignment is about exploring new ways that text can connect for the reader on the single page and from page to page. Graphic and web designers typically use differences in typography—contrast, proportion, white-space, font styles, color, shape—to create visual hierarchies so that the reader has clues about how to read. They also put graphics and type into diagrammatic arrangements. Repetition of design elements creates structure and context. Think of link colors, background color, navigation tabs.

Digital artists/writers, inspired by the typographic and diagrammatic experiments of the 1920s avant-garde, also use difference and repetition of design elements, but with more of an interest in creating non-hierarchical structures; open forms that rely on associations made visually on the page (Drucker). But even a collage of language fragments can be semantically difficult to read without some rhythm in the visual arrangement of text. How can you make text fragments relate dynamically on the page (and from page-to-page) and still maintain narrative coherence?

Drawing on your story summaries as source material, construct a diagrammatic narrative using ideas/strategies from Drucker’s Diagrammatic Writing and any other typographic/diagrammatic work that inspires you. You may use Illustrator, Photoshop, even video. However, Google Slides is probably the best and easiest because of the ease of manipulating text blocks and presenting as a slide show on a blog post (embed the slideshow in your post). There should be at least 3–4 panels or pages. Stories that have structures following the Western three-act plot or the Japanese four-act (Kishōtenketsu) plot will probably work best. You may use color, various fonts, and graphic elements (arrows, borders, basic shapes), but please do not use images. Let the text fragments, their arrangement, and typography guide your composition of the story.

Visual Narrative (10%)

We have discussed many strategies/approaches to visual narration and how story time—events and incidents, actions and reactions—can be made visible and relational in pictorial space through:

In this assignment, you are to use images to tell a story. The images may include symbols, shapes, colors, drawings, graphics, or photos. Your images may be accompanied by text (narration or dialogue), but images and their spatial relationships should drive the narrative, not the text. In other words, try not to make illustrations for a pre-written script. Instead, investigate new ways to organize images—on the single page and from page to page— in order to get across your particular visual story. Remember: the pictorial frame and the user’s navigation of the frame(s) are elements of visual storytelling.

Use Photoshop or Illustrator, your pencil, phone camera, AI image-generation, and/or public domain image downloads. If you are drawing your images, bring them into Photoshop or Illustrator to outline/color. Use Google Slides or create a webpage (with ChatGPT) to present your image sequence.

Video/Audio Anecdote (10%)

For this project, you are to make a 30–60 second video using continuity and/or montage techniques. Edit together video clips, animation and/or still images, recorded audio, voice-over and/or sound effects to tell the story. It is up to you how you “narrate” the story—through just images with sound effects, your own voice-over, text on the screen, or an interview with the subject. The images do not have to illustrate the spoken narration, but should relate and help reinforce the story. This project is about using multiple types of media to tell a time-based story.

Ideas

Hypermedia Narrative (10%)

Digital stories created by and for a computer environment can include non-linear navigation, direct access to data, stored data in databases, variables, conditionals, search, interface design, random and parallel processes, hyperlinks, and other forms of user interaction or “agency.”

“Hypermedia” refers to linked media. Hypermedia can be a linear or directed path of links—for example, from text to image to video—like pages in a book. A work of hypermedia can also present a network of links—branching or open—where repetition of story elements is part of the experience of navigation.

In this assignment you will explore the possibilities of storytelling using any of the above computational processes. This is an exercise that might be the start or framework of a larger idea that can develop further as a final project.

Final Project (30%)

The final project is to be a digital story that incorporates at least two of the modules covered in this class: diagrammatic, visual, cinematic, hyperlinked/interactive, game-like storytelling. The work may be a significant reworking of a previous project or a new idea and direction.

The final project will have required stages and deadlines and each of these will be graded separately for a certain percentage of the final grade. It is important that you do not leave everything to the last minute. There should be progress each week until it is due. Our class time will be focused on building these stories so that you can get help from me and your classmates.