Seven Elements of a Digital Story according to John Lambert. Click here for his full text.
| Overview | 1. Point of View | 2. Dramatic Question |
| 3. Emotional Content | 4. Gift of Your Voice | 5. Power of Soundtrack |
| 6. Economy | 7. Pacing | Return to Workshop Page |
Judging from the vast number of books published on the subject, the ways to
approach crafting a story are endless. There is only the way that works for
any one person. In our classes, the participants arrive with an enormous range
of skills and life experience that suggest a particular path for the structure
and style of their story. Coaching the storyteller through the conception of
their story is a dynamic process, not a prescribed one. An entire range of issues
must be considered while offering suggestions, both technical and emotional.
When we succeed in providing the right sort of feedback to the creator, we
often witness an extraordinary transformation in the quality of story. It is
enormously gratifying for us as teachers to bring a new story to life. To see
the eyes of the creator well up with tears of surprise and joy at what he or
she has accomplished, and to see others moved and inspired by the power of the
piece, is what keeps us going, class after class.
Two years into teaching our workshop, we decided to introduce each class to
the elements of constructing a multimedia story. Our principal consideration
in preparing this lecture was to make it brief and inspirational. Between their
emotional fragility in exploring a personal issue and their feelings of inadequacy
about working with computers or multimedia, the last thing our students needed
was someone dictating a specific formula to them. So we kept it simple, illustrating
our few points with examples of student work from previous classes.
Our experience has also shown us that even people with years of training in
various kinds of storytelling and communication lose touch with the fundamentals.
Our hope is that people will use this as a starting point and then do as we
have done: develop mentors, develop a library of resources, and deepen their
practice to improve their skills and develop the level of mastery that makes
sense for their occupation and interests.
The elements we describe in the pages that follow give you a great deal to consider in constructing your story. We emphasize our storytelling process in a group setting because we believe that most of us do not just read a book and do the work. If you are reading this disassociated from some group process, we strongly suggest you go find at least one collaborator or fellow storyteller. Storytelling is meant to be a collaborative art. It is much more realistic this way, and much more fun.
What makes a story a story? Dictionary definitions may call it a narrative, a tale, a report, an account, and that would seem to cover it. But hold on. When we think of a story, true or imagined, we do not consider someone sitting in front of us reciting a series of events like a robot: "This happened, then this happened, and then this happened." Hardly anybody ever narrates the events in their lives without some good reason for it.
We believe all stories are told to make a point. Most human stories follow the
pattern of describing a desire, taking us through the action that desire led
us to perform, and what realization came about as a result of our experiencing
the events of our actions in relationship to our original desire. By point of
view, we primarily are addressing this issue of defining the specific realization
you, as an author, are trying to communicate within your story. Because every
part of the story can service this point, it becomes imperative to define this
goal in order to direct the editing process.
We need to look no further than proverbs to illustrate what we mean by a point
of view. "A stitch in time saves nine." "A penny wise and a pound
foolish." These are the points of stories, what somebody realized is the
actual result, versus the desired effect, of a planned action. We may have forgotten
the stories, but we remember the point. In novels or theater, another way of
expressing the point of the story is the central premise. For example, in King
Lear, the point or central premise is "blind trust leads to destruction."
In Macbeth, it is "unbridled greed leads to destruction." Every part
of the dramatic action can be boiled down to serving these points of view, and
our connection with the story often succeeds or fails in how we understand the
central premise as the operating context for the story’s action. In well-crafted
stories, the point may be a little less apparent than the moral of a fairy tale,
and it might require some thought, but if the story touched you, chances are
you can define some central points or the transformative realizations the author
intended.
Example: In 1994, we assisted on a project called The Answer,
created by the husband-and-wife team of Rob Decker and Suzanne Serpas. They
were both psychologists with an interest in the potential of autobiography as
a therapeutic tool. They came to us with a large box of stock commercial images
and an ambitious concept to provide a metaphoric look at the importance of a
humanist perspective on the world, a kind of commercial for their brand of psychotherapy.
We felt that they had defined their subject so broadly that they would not be
able to complete the project over the weekend. We also felt that their personal
connection to the point of the story was lost. We suggested they narrow the
subject and asked if they had an example of the kind of realization they wanted
their audience to experience. Rob subsequently offered the story that became
the script of the final piece. They simply juxtaposed Rob reciting the story
with the standard family images and home video and voilà: a powerful
little tale about their realization about how we define our essential human
values from an early age.
In thinking about the point of a story, we should also be considering the reason
for the story. Why this story, now, for this group of people? Defining these
issues inevitably helps to define which of the many proverbial summations we
might take from a given story. Here is a typical give-and-take situation on
defining the purpose of a story:I want to summarize a recent conference I attended
abroad as an interesting story. My initial approach is to show some material
from the conference, talk about the highlights, and how it failed or succeeded
at meeting or exceeding my expectations. I run this past my boss, who reminds
me that the presentation is for a specific group in the company working on issues
that were only addressed in a single workshop. A general summary is too broad.
So I adjust my story again, describing the give and take between participants
and a balance of positive and negative insights about the subject being addressed
in the context of the larger conference. But my boss suggests that the purpose
of the presentation is not dry analysis, but inspiration, so could the positive,
or particularly inspiring, insights be highlighted from the session? So I adjust
the story and remove the critical or negative feedback. Finally my boss says,
"Well, that is kind of boring and dry, can’t we spice it up?"
I scratch my head. "Spice it up," I think. "Heck, it just wasn’t
that spicy. But, hmm, that gives me an idea."
I remember, during the informal sightseeing part of the trip, hearing someone
talk about the maritime history of the city and its involvement in the spice
trade. A critical innovation in the design of the merchant ships led to their
capturing a large part of the spice trade and turned the city into a thriving
metropolis. I think, "What if?" and go back to work.
The final piece is about innovation: mixing sightseeing scenes, a few old historical photos, and images of people attending the conference into a story about this maritime innovation and a script that extends a few nautical metaphors to set up the sound bites of the conference highlights. The point of this story may be that it is best to please your boss, but you can see also how a specific definition of the project’s intended uses drives your definition of the central premise, which then prescribes all of the editing decisions.
We believe all stories are personal. Even our rather straightforward corporate
report carries with it the indelible stamp of the author. For most storytellers,
couching the story in the first-person point of view, either throughout the
story or as a frame around the story, is an invitation to hearing the story
in a more personal context. This tends to increase our attention as we look
for insights about you as a storyteller. That is, "This is my version of
events and my realizations, and I am self-aware about how my own prejudices,
expertise, and frames of reference affect the ‘truth’ about the
story." We are becoming increasingly sophisticated at discerning the authenticity
of information. In general, we prefer the frank admission of responsibility
that the first-person voice provides to the authoritative, seemingly neutral,
but nevertheless obscure stance of the third-person voice.
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2) A Dramatic Question: Simply making a point doesn’t necessarily keep people’s attention throughout a story. Well-crafted stories, from Shakespeare to Seinfeld, set up a tension from the beginning that holds you until the story is over. To use our desire-action-realization model, we are talking about how we establish a central desire in the beginning in such a way that the satisfaction or denial of that desire must be resolved in order for the story to end. The conflicts that arise between our desires being met and the desire of other characters or larger forces to stop us creates the dramatic tension.
Dramatic and storytelling theorists, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists
since the time of Aristotle have attempted to analyze how the action of a story
is established and sustained. We have found that delineating structural story
components for students who are essentially working in a short narrative form
is much too complicated. Writing a script that slavishly follows a formal structure
tends to create wooden, melodramatic writing that we can smell a mile off as
not reflecting the author’s true voice. So we have reduced these several
concepts to one.
We refer to a term coined from dramatic theory, "the dramatic question,"
to summarize an approach. In a romance, will the girl get the guy? In an adventure,
will the hero reach the goal? In a crime or murder mystery, who did it? When
any of these questions are answered, the story is over. Again, sophisticated
story making distinguishes itself by burying the presentation of the dramatic
question, like the realization, in ways that do not call attention to the underlying
structure.
Tanya’s Story was created in the very first digital storytelling class
we taught at the American Film Institute in 1993. It remains one of the most
poignant and efficient expressions of digital storytelling we have experienced
and also has served as an ideal example of a number of the elements we are currently
describing, particularly the dramatic question. The statement of the dramatic
question is elegantly posed and resolved in the first and closing lines. Monte
states at the beginning that she didn’t understand friendship. At the
end she leaves us with a rather open-ended statement, "I couldn’t
believe she knew my middle name." It does not take much sophistication
to interpret the dramatic question, "What is the meaning of friendship?"
The answer suggests that it is the ways in which we un-self-consciously exchange
intimate information with each other.
In this case, the particular meaning of the resolution of the dramatic question
is in fact the central point of the story. But here is an important distinction.
What we are really talking about with the dramatic question is a structural
"setup," corresponding to a logical "payoff." The meaning
of the story, as we have suggested, doesn’t have to have anything to do
with the structure, just as there are hundreds of ways to draw different meanings
out of any given sequence of events.
We are trained from early on to recognize that different dramatic questions
often lead to predictable answers. If the question is about how the girl gets
the guy, our immediate assumption is that either the guy, or someone the guy
knows, doesn’t want the guy to be gotten. As a result, manipulating expectations
is precisely what entertains us. What if the girl thinks she wants one guy,
but she really wants the guy who is trying to stop her from getting the original
guy? What if she decides to chuck the whole thing and become a nun? Are we unhappy?
Only if there was nothing to suggest that these events were consistent with
her behavior will we be confused or dismayed. A good author will make you think
the central dramatic question was "Will the girl get the guy?" when
it really was "Will the girl find happiness?", and we have learned
early on that she doesn’t define herself completely by her role as spousal
partner. If you watch movies, you know the possibilities for manipulating the
dramatic question are endless. When we have the expectation pulled out from
under us in a story, when the realization is dramatically different than the
setup, it tickles us. The classic short story does the same, leading us quickly
into a direction that establishes our expectations, only to twist the expectation
at the end. The more you learn about dramatic structure, the more you dissect
familiar stories into their structural components. The more you experiment with
rewarding or surprising your audience’s expectations established by a
dramatic question, the more rich and complex your stories will become.
3) Emotional Content: All of us have been in the middle of a story, a novel, a film, a theatrical or storytelling performance and found ourselves emotionally engaged. It is as if the story had reached inside our consciousness and taken hold of us, and we know in that moment that we are in for a tearful or joyous ride. This effect is principally a result of a truthful approach to emotional material. A story that deals directly with the fundamental emotional paradigms–of death and our sense of loss, of love and loneliness, of confidence and vulnerability, of acceptance and rejection–will stake a claim on our hearts. Beginning with content that addresses or couches itself in one or another of those contexts will improve the likelihood that you are going to hold an audience’s attention. These are areas that for many of us are a challenge to express in a piece of personal writing or media. We may lack the experience of trying, as most if not all of our formal training processes in narrative–from scholarly essays to journalistic reports–stress distance and de-emotionalized perspectives. Or we may be unresolved about the emotional material, keeping us from gaining perspective or meaning from these experiences. The result of our failure to express our most honest understandings about these kinds of subject matter can lead us to trivialize or overdramatize the material. It can also lead us to being simply overwhelmed by feelings that are brought to the surface. Is it worth the effort to expose oneself emotionally? In most cases, it is. In our experience with the group production process, people value the courage to explore the intimate space of emotional vulnerability so highly that they will go out of their way to support those willing to attempt emotionally sensitive stories. But sometimes we are forced to steer students away from overpowering material, to select a different approach, or abandon the subject of the story entirely. This part of digital storytelling requires plain old-fashioned common sense and maturity. Along these lines, many people that read this may want to experiment with teaching or leading workshops as a way to mine powerful stories from a group of associates for the purposes of linking those emotions to a product, cause, or service. We want to emphasize that exploring emotional material is a personal decision.
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4) The Gift of your Voice: In our classes
we encourage the storyteller to record a voiceover. Students may want to make
a piece with only images and music, and some are working on stories that they
feel are best suited to a particular voiceover or character representation.
What we have learned in this process is in itself revealing. I grew up with
a lisp. When I was seven or eight, I had to go to speech therapy classes thso
I wouldn’t thspeak thso listhpisthly. Like most kids, it made me hate
the way my voice sounded. That didn’t stop me from being the class clown
and being the ham in the school productions, or perhaps it emboldened me. But
when I first ran into a tape recorder, I couldn’t stand the way I sounded.
And frankly, it still bothers me. Having worked with a lot of people who are
creating a piece of video that includes their voice for the first time, I realize
I am not alone. Either we feel we don’t have the clearest diction, or
our voices waver, or we are too soft, or too gravelly, or just not like those
caramel-textured assertive voices that come across our television sets and radios.
Truly, our voice is a great gift. Those of us fortunate enough to be able to
talk out loud should love our voices, because they tell everyone so much about
who we are, both how strong we can be and how fragile. We listen to words spoken
in various inflections and go into different modes of listening, which are also
different modes of conscious interaction. When we hear conversational tones,
we are listening for the moment that suggests response or affirmation, the "Oh
I agree, but ..." or the "hm-hmm." In a speech we are listening
for an applause line. In a lecture, we are listening for the major points, the
outline. In a story, we are listening for an organic rhythmic pattern that allows
us to float into reverie. In the place of reverie we have a complex interaction
between following the story and allowing the associative memories the story
conjures up to wash over us. Consistency in presentation is what allows us in
the audience to participate, and breaking consistency, such as a person who
is reciting a monologue suddenly asking someone in the front row a question,
is jarring.
We have one specific concern to address about recording our voices: reading
versus reciting the script. We all know what it feels like to be at a public
event when someone reads a speech from beginning to end. It is downright uncomfortable.
We do not know how to interact. We are caught someplace between waiting for
the speaker to give pause for us to respond and wanting to drift into reverie,
but the cadence and style of presentation does not allow it. We also know why
people end up reading texts. They are petrified to speak and/or they simply
do not have the time to practice the speech enough so that they can recite from
memory. Similarly, in recording a voiceover from a script in our workshops,
there usually is a combination of fear and lack of time for practice that means
a reading seems like the only option.
The easiest way to improve upon a recording of your voice is to keep the writing
terse. Record several takes of the text. The nice thing about a digital sound
file is that you can mix and match each of the recording takes to create the
best-sounding version. We suggest you work at speaking slowly in a conversational
style. Finally, digitally constructing the story from a recorded interview is
always a good fallback.
5) The Power of the Soundtrack: In our
experience working with beginning students, their intuitive sense of what is
appropriate for a media piece is by far their most developed skill in the storytelling
arts. In an era where we describe an entire generation as "the children
of MTV," as people defined by their absorption of visual media in the context
of music, is it any real surprise?
We have come to believe that people now walk around with soundtracks running
in their heads. Those soundtracks set the mood of our day, change the way we
perceive the visual information streaming into our eyes, and establish a rhythm
for our step. It is as if by listening to or imagining a specific slice of music,
we are putting ourselves into our own movie, a movie that puts our life into
a clearer perspective, or at least entertains us. From earlier and earlier ages
we are aware of the trick that music can play on our perception of visual information.
We are all aware of how music in a film stirs up an emotional response very
different than what the visual information inherently suggests. The sudden opening
of the door becomes the prelude to disaster, when the swelling treble of orchestrated
strings calls out suspense to our ears. A sweetly flowing melody over two people
looking at each other for the first time signals that these are the romantic
characters we will be following in the plot. We know upbeat music means happy
endings, slow and tremulous music means sadness is forecast, fast music means
action, heroic music means battles and victorious heroes are likely. We know
the stereotype, and it is repeated enough from one show to the next that we
often laugh when we catch ourselves being caught up in the manipulation. As
such, even the beginning student makes appropriate decisions about music that
either play into or against the stereotype.
The majority of our students use popular lyrical music. While the songs usually
work, mistakes are sometimes made in mixing the lyrical story of the song and
the voiceover narrative in a way that gives us an unintended conflict of meaning.
I remember a young student who liked a particular song that had an appropriate
tempo and timbre for his story about his family, but in listening a bit more
to the lyrics, we realized the song was a fairly steamy account of passion.
We asked if that was intended and the student admitted that he had not really
thought about what was being said in the song. Instrumental music, be it classical,
folk, jazz, or ambient, is often better suited to the style and meaning of the
story’s text and visual narratives. The digital context makes testing
a particular music in the video much easier than in film and analog media, and
so experimentation is encouraged. You may find that, by going against the expected,
you create another complete layer of meaning that adds depth and complexity
to your story. Are music videos, or the juxtaposition of music and visual information
in a media piece without text and voiceover, storytelling? The answer is yes.
However, the specificity of language and the complexity of information that
the human voice provides adds enormous emotional substance and authenticity
to the media story. So far we have not experienced a single music video that
created as powerful an emotional impact as the same story would have with the
addition of the author’s voice.
The other area of sound use popular in the film and video tradition is sound
effects and other elements of sound design beyond the mix of music and text.
There is no question that the greater design of ambient sound or appropriate
noises can add complexity to the narrative. They also can be juxtaposed to add
surprise and humor. The development of these skills should be considered if
the storytelling projects call for an increased sense of realism or, for that
matter, surrealism. Otherwise, it is perhaps best not to experiment with sound
effects as their incidental use is usually more of a distraction.
Using one’s own voice and existing personal archival material has the advantage of being copyrighted by you as the author. By using other's music, you are also likely crossing into the territory of deciding what should be the appropriate fair use of the copyrighted material. Put simply, if you are going to make money directly or indirectly by the presentation or distribution of the piece you have created, then you should have the composer's permission to use the music. Fortunately, numerous companies have developed copyright-free music collections and software to assist you in designing a soundtrack that is wholly yours.
6: Economy: Despite our emphasis on story, text, and sound,
digital media for many storytellers is principally a visual medium that integrates
the other elements. As a visual medium we are concerned with composition and
juxtaposition of visual elements in a single screen and over time. Since our
emphasis is in repurposing existing images and video, your initial compositional
considerations were already decided by your relative skill in shooting a picture
or framing a video. Our concern is more with sequential composition. In any
story we use a process called closure. Closure means recognizing the pattern
of information being shown or described to us in bits and pieces, and completing
the pattern in our minds. In spoken word or a written narrative, we are operating
at a high level of closure as we are filling in all the pictures suggested by
a text or words from images and memories in our brains. If I start a story,
"Once upon a midnight dreary..." you are likely to immediately fill
in a mental image of a foreboding castle, rainstorms, ravens, the works. We
need specific sensual details, shapes, smells, textures to be stated for us
to fill in the picture in our mind.
Storytelling with images means consciously economizing language in relationship
to the narrative that is provided by the juxtaposition of images. There are
two tracks of meaning, the visual and the auditory, and we need to think about
the degree of closure each provides in relation to the other. In a normal screenwriting
process, the writer is conscious of the visual information as the context for
the spoken dialogue or narration, and he or she writes into the visual backdrop
of the scenes. If the writer and director do a good job, they will shoot just
what is necessary to keep the story visually rich while moving forward, with
only the minimum of dialogue and number of scenes necessary to allow us to envision
the larger story.
However, we generally are working with projects where the images and scenes
exist prior to the script, as in the family album. So the natural approach is
to make a visual narrative, to line up the photos on a table, and then figure
out what to say about the pictures. The advantage is that you can be very specific
about what information you must fill in to make sense of the narrative. The
disadvantage is that if there is too big of a gap for the audience to close
between images, you are left with holes in your story that you have to invent
pictures to fill. We have decided that there is no right or wrong way to compose
in this situation–script first or image sequence first. Different people
have intuitive skills in the visual or text modes.
Economy is generally the largest problem with telling a story. Most people
do not realize that the story they have to tell can be effectively illustrated
with a small number of images and video, and a relatively short text. We purposely
put limitations on the number of images and video clips our students use. We
also suggest that, if they are starting with a script, they create a storyboard
with their material and look at every possible way to edit their words prior
to beginning the production process.
7: Pacing: Often the most transparent
feature of a story is how it is paced. Pacing is considered by many to be the
true secret of successful storytelling. The rhythm of a story determines much
of what sustains an audience’s interest. A fast-paced movie with many
quick edits and upbeat music can suggest urgency, action, nervousness, exasperation,
and excitement. Conversely, a slow pace will suggest contemplation, romanticism,
relaxation, or simple pleasures. Changing pace, even in a short digital story,
is very effective. Our narrative can have starts and stops, pauses, and quickly
spurted phrases. You can always change music tempo to build a sense of action
or release. Moving from a panning effect on a still image that slowly stretches
out our concentration, followed by a burst of images in staccato succession,
staggers our senses and vitalizes the media piece.
And vitality is the essential issue. Good stories breathe. They move along generally
at an even pace, but once in a while they stop. They take a deep breath and
proceed. Or if the story calls for it they walk a little faster, and faster
until they are running, but sooner or later they have to run out of breath and
stop and wheeze at the side of the road. Anything that feels like a mechanical
rhythm, anything that does not allow for that pause, to let us consider what
the story has revealed, soon loses our interest. Again, trust your own sense
of what works. Everyone moves at his or her own pace.
Now you're ready to get started