Author Archives: 1Ld1k0
5 Ways to Improve Your Digital Storytelling
Tristan Barrocks, “The Digital Storyteller,” guides us through the ABCs of great digital storytelling and provides five ways to improve your storytelling today. If you want to become even better at crafting a great story, this one’s for you.
Make your story human-centered
In many of my workshops, I often challenge the participants to show humanity in their stories. Why? Because no one cares about stories that they cannot relate to. Whether we tell stories about climate change, endangered species, or exotic foods, we need to center these themes around the human experience. What are the elements of the human experience that we can all relate to? Hurt, pain, or rejection. Loss of a loved one, fear of death, the excitement of overcoming. All of these parts of being human can help to keep your stories grounded and relatable. If our audiences don’t see themselves or someone they know in our stories, they won’t care about our stories.
Define your audience
Here are some questions that may help with defining your audience.
What motivates your audience?
Where are they from?
What do they do for a living?
What problems do they need solutions for?
What’s important to them?
How will your perspective better inform your audience?
The best way to define your audience is by imagining that your story is a conversation and the viewers are the other participants.
Storyboard or die
Anything worth creating deserves a blueprint. Something that can keep you accountable for the final idea. Creating a storyboard is a critical part of the storytelling process because it allows you to have a clear, well-thought-out visual strategy. What shots do you need to create the desired tone? How do you prepare to get for each shot? All of these questions can be answered with a clear storyboard.
Use great music
If the visual elements of a film can be described as its “body,” then the music used in a film is definitely its “soul.” There is nothing more effective in enhancing your digital stories than using the right music. Music often sets the depo or tone for important character beats (pardon the pun). It can be used as a cue for the audience to lean into the story a bit more. It helps the story release tension and transition to new moments. Often, I discover the right song before I even start the editing process because the music lays the foundation for me to create the moments I want the audience to experience.
READ the full article here – by Tristan Barrocks, Digital Storyteller
Merry Christmas!
On Joy
I created this short video as a reminder of finding joy in the smallest of things in life.
When I look at small children, I am reminded the Life is a wonder and a joyful journey of discovering. When I look at pre-teens and teenagers I often wonder where the magic or childhood has gone! Hahahaha! Brooding and thoughtful teens out there! Please remember the Life is not as serious and disappointing as it looks. Look for the moments of sweet joy heralded by a smile, vivid colours of nature, in a kind text, or else. Joy and sweetness is out there somewhere, remember to look for it!
If I should have a daughter …
… I would like to her to be like Sarah Key. Why? Because she has a VOICE. She is inspiring, fearless, and outspoken. All the qualities I admire about a woman. A young woman of that! She stands up and stands out.
In her talk below, that has been watched by over 15 million people so far, she says
… that’s what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything, if you let it. I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, … Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away. You will put the wind in win some, lose some. You will put the star in starting over, and over. … And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
Who is Sarah Key?
Sarah Kay is a poet, performer, educator and the founder of Project VOICE, an organization that uses spoken word poetry to entertain, educate and empower students and teachers worldwide.
Sarah Kay has shared her poetry in 30 countries on six continents: in the middle of cornfields in Iowa, an orthodontist office in Nepal, a viking ship on a fjord in Norway, an LGBTQ community center in India, a church in New Zealand, a nightclub in Singapore, the Royal Danish Theater in Denmark, a public square in Estonia, Carnegie Hall in New York City, the back rooms of bars, juvenile detention centers, middle school gymnasiums and everywhere in between. Her poetry can be found on Netflix TV shows, Uniqlo T-shirts and bookstore shelves. She is the author of four best-selling books of poetry including B, The Type, No Matter the Wreckage and All Our Wild Wonder.
Immersive technology
Watch the video below from Google, which predicts what the world will look like once immersive technology, including VR and AR, becomes, well, more immersed in our everyday lives. Kind of freaky, right?
Make your drawing come to life!
Live Texturing of Augmented Reality Characters from Colored Drawings – Drawing became more fun than ever before. And you dont even have to be a professional artist. Even very basic drawings can come to life using this fun app.
Coloring books capture the imagination of children and provide them with one of their earliest opportunities for creative expression. However, given the proliferation and popularity of digital devices, real-world activities like coloring can seem unexciting, and children become less engaged in them. Augmented reality holds unique potential to impact this situation by providing a bridge between real-world activities and digital enhancements. In this paper, we present an augmented reality coloring book App in which children color characters in a printed coloring book and inspect their work using a mobile device. The drawing is detected and tracked, and the video stream is augmented with an animated 3-D version of the character that is textured according to the child’s coloring. This is possible thanks to several novel technical contributions. We present a texturing process that applies the captured texture from a 2-D colored drawing to both the visible and occluded regions of a 3-D character in real time. We develop a deformable surface tracking method designed for colored drawings that uses a new outlier rejection algorithm for real-time tracking and surface deformation recovery. We present a content creation pipeline to efficiently create the 2-D and 3-D content. And, finally, we validate our work with two user studies that examine the quality of our texturing algorithm and the overall App experience.
AR in Action!
Commuters at a London bus stop have seen alien invasions, monsters from the sewers grabbing pedestrians and tigers running down the street as part of an elaborate advertising campaign. HOW? With the clever use of Augmented Reality (AR).
What is AR?
Augmented reality (AR) is an enhanced version of the real physical world that is achieved through the use of digital visual elements, sound, or other sensory stimuli delivered via technology.
The optical illusion was created by combining video footage from a camera mounted on the rear of the bus stop with pre-prepared special effects.
The Silent Child
Oscar® Winning Short Film
A deaf 6-year-old girl named Libby lives in a world of silence until a caring social worker gives her the gift of communication.
“Gorgeously shot and perfectly performed, the movie delivers an emotional wallop that many features six times its length never achieve” – The New York Times “Effortlessly heart-tugging” – Los Angeles Times “A rich script from first-time screenwriter Rachel Shenton” – IndieWire “It’s beautiful and it’s a real little movie. I loved it” – The Hollywood Reporter
Thrive by Five
Connect, Talk and Play with us! says seven year old Molly as she explains the key tools for a child’s brain development.
“What if I was to tell you that a game of peek-a-boo could change the world?” asks seven-year-old Molly Wright, one of the youngest-ever TED speakers. Breaking down the research-backed ways parents and caregivers can support children’s healthy brain development, Wright highlights the benefits of play on lifelong learning, behavior and well-being, sharing effective strategies to help all kids thrive by the age of five. She’s joined onstage by one-year-old Ari and his dad, Amarjot, who help illustrate her big ideas about brain science. (This TED Talk was produced in collaboration with Minderoo Foundation as an educational tool for parents and caregivers around the world and is supported by UNICEF.)