Idea for Story Telling

Recently, I had the opportunity to watch @kentmanning in action at his digital story telling session at the Minds on Media session before the ECOO Conference. He had a great concept, merging a bunch of different technologies and so I told him I was about to steal the idea, dress it up with OESS licensed software and blog about it. Here goes…

First we head off and grab out digital cameras to get some pictures to establish the story. That’s easily enough done and I’m going to do a three slide comic using the Ministry of Education licensed Comic Life software. The difference, though, is that I’m not going to create a page with three panels; I’m going to create three pages by dragging each picture to its own separate page. Then, we add the comic dialogue. My volunteers for this project are Beauregard of this blog fame, and my daughter’s dog Cain the Conqueror. This comic has them musing about their Christmas presents this year.

Next, I’m going to head to Audacity and then record my very best dog impersonations for each of the comics.  For each, I’m going to save the sounds as an individual .wav file.  The teachable moment appears when both dogs are speaking at the same time.  Just make sure to have the two sounds recorded and played back at the same time.  And, remember that Boxers slobber!

Now, there’s some quality comic writing.  From the File Menu, I’m going to export the comic to images.  Comic Life will ask to put them into a folder so that’s great.  Comic Life also numbers them for me.  Most importantly, Comic Life creates the new images with the captions saved on them.

Now, to assemble this masterpiece.

Open Adobe Premiere Elements.  Here, you can sequence the events and put the voices with the pictures.  You can also use all of the effects that are at your disposal.  Be as creative as you want.  Throw in some transitions and other effects.  Don’t have Adobe Premier Elements easily available?  Windows Movie Maker does a nice job too.  Select your media and drag and drop it to the timeline.

Now, it’s just a matter of exporting your beautiful project to your hard drive and you’re good to go.  Looking to embed in a wiki or webpage?  Use the Adobe Media Encoder which is part of the Ministry licensed Adobe Creative Suite CS4 or any other way that you would convert to .flv format.  Then, you’re good to go.

 

Or, at least as good as you can make it!

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