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 (15%)

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 (15%)

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 Narrative (15%)

For this project, you will create a 30–90 second video narrative. The video can be live action, still images, animation, recorded audio, voice-over, text on screen, or any combination of these elements.

The most important requirement is that your video tells a story. The story may be real or fictional, but it must have a clear:

You may narrate your story through voice-over, on-screen text, sound design, visuals alone, or a combination. The images do not have to literally illustrate the narration, but they should contribute to the emotional tone, meaning, or progression of the story.

Use editing techniques such as continuity (smooth, logical progression) and/or montage (juxtaposition of images to create meaning). Consider how sequencing, timing, framing, sound, and transitions shape the viewer’s experience.

Media Options

Ideas

Hypermedia Narrative (15%)

Digital stories created for a computer environment can include non-linear navigation, direct access to data, variables, conditionals, interface design, random and parallel processes, hyperlinks, timed events, sound, image, video, and other forms of user interaction or agency. Unlike a traditional printed story, a hypermedia narrative can respond to the choices, actions, and attention of the reader/user.

“Hypermedia” refers to linked media. A hypermedia work may guide a user along a mostly linear path, or it may branch, loop, fragment, or open into a network of story elements. Some works are primarily text-based. Others combine text with sound, graphics, symbols, animation, photography, video, or interactive interface elements. Repetition, variation, discovery, and choice can all become part of the storytelling experience.

In this assignment, you will create an interactive story meant to be explored or experienced by a reader/user on a computer screen. Your project may be made in Twine (the downloaded desktop version only, not the online version) or you may build your own interactive project using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you build your own project, you may use AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude.ai to help you brainstorm, plan, troubleshoot, or generate code, but you are still responsible for understanding, shaping, and crediting the work you submit.

Your project can include game-like elements such as exploration, puzzles, scoring, inventory, or simple goals, but it must function first and foremost as a story experience. The reader/user should encounter characters, events, situations, memories, environments, or conflicts that unfold through interaction. In other words, this is not simply a game mechanic demo. It is an interactive narrative.

Project Possibilities

Your narrative may be:

Requirements

What Matters Most

Process Note

Along with your project, submit a brief process note explaining your concept, the structure of the work, the tools you used, and any AI tools that contributed to coding, planning, writing, or design. If you used generated code, identify where and how you modified or learned from it.

Goal

This assignment is an opportunity to explore storytelling as a computational, interactive, and multimedia form. Think of it as a contained experiment or prototype that could become the foundation for a larger final project. The strongest projects will not simply present content on a screen, but will use interaction, structure, and media to create a distinct narrative experience.

Final Project (20%)

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.