For this week’s go at identifying storified and non storified content, I took a look at a site I’ve watched evolve over the past three years, Window Farming.  One upon a time the site, as I recall, was single page with embedded video clips and links to schematics on how to construct a window farm. […]

Title:  “Best Commercial EVER!” The commercial tracks closely to the viral experience architecture discussed in this week’s reading.  I starts off with a teenager entering a dark alley in the middle of the night layered with mysterious music accented by an repeating ominous tone, as if something no-good or bad is happening or about to happen.  The […]

  Comments and reflections on This American Life: Episode 503 “I Was Just Trying To Help” Prologue:  Sharon was a clerk for circuit court judge in Missouri. While she was at work, a man and a woman approached her looking for some paperwork so they could help out their brother, who was in prison for […]

I’m mixing things up a bit and doing things a little out of sequence than how the Week 1 assignment was intended. After finding some “balance” between work, life, school after a sick week, I’m slowly making my way through WordPress, trying to upgrade my blog site to one that is appealing, engaging and inventive. I remember […]

Up and Down the Story Goes….

As part of a school assignment (GMU EDIT 572 Digital Audio/Video Design), I was to Explore the Shape of Stories by applying Kurt Vonnegut’s structure of stories to a story, poem, song, etc., familiar to me. Reflexively, my mind went immediately to, yes, The Princess Bride. It’s not as timeless as Cinderella, but it has all the elements, a bit remixed for 21st century […]

Just to demonstrate the use of Galleries for your wordpress sites, here’s what I have been suffering through this past week… You should first enable some of the gallery features in your own site via Settings — Media You can create these galleries from the images you upload to wordpress, via the Add Media Button. […]

What storytelling means to me: it’s a journey with someone. It’s personal. It’s engaging, and it makes you feel different emotions. It can be used for many different reasons, such as sharing and preserving histories and cultures; for simplifying a difficult concept or idea—like a metaphor; and for entertainment. A story usually has a beginning, […]

Once upon a time…there was a boxer called Mickey Ward who lived in a working-class suburb of Boston training to be a boxer. Every day….he would train with his brother to try to win a welterweight title But one day….he was put into the ring with an opponent who was much heavier than he was, […]

The Fighter storyline, I believe, aligns with a couple of the rules. One that jumped out was rule ‘#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.’ Our hero is a pretty undramatic, patient character, with strong families ties. The story is ‘gritty’ so the […]

A film that follows Vonnegut’s approach: The Fighter, directed by Rusell, and staring Wahlberg, Bale, Adams and others. It begins with a disheartened boxer, who is being trained by his older brother and managed by his self-serving mother, getting beaten up and knocked down by a heavier, mismatched, opponent. (This is the downward slump ‘phase’.) […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I use the word reflection often in teaching ds106- it has shades of meaning, and less of looking at your own outward appearances but re-processing the work you are doing in learning and practicing digital storytelling. Sure Malcolm Gladwell suggests if we do […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine For the first week of DS106 Goes to Work, I’ve asked students to be on the look out for things in their world that might benefit from a “storified” approach. This was deliberately left vague, and I want students to struggle a bit […]

A road is a rich visual metaphor, a path, a sense of adventure, leading you someplace, openness… but in the case of Cormac McCarthy’s book, it is also one dark view of the future of our quite/unquote civilization. The tale is usually described as grim. post-apocalyptic– and the setting most certainly is, with the cannibalism, […]

Welcome to my second blog site. I like to consider myself pretty quick with technology. So, I raced ahead with my first blog site but after-the-fact found issue after issue. So, I took my second blog site a little slower, and here I am. My thoughts on setting this up?  I don’t consider myself a blogger at […]

As we wrap up the first week of EDIT 572, I learned a few things.  First, don’t things until the last minute!  Second blogging is more enjoyable than I thought it would be. I now I scrutinize every commercial  I see to determine if it has the needed elements for story.  That Bud Light commercial […]

When “recipe” is suggested, what comes to mind is Julia Child.  I like to cook, and I have Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but I confess I’ve only made a few things from it because in general it’s just a really intimidating cookbook, even though I consider myself a fairly advanced, adventurous […]

Four settings come to mind when I think of “storytelling” Being read to as a child by my parents at night before bed. Library time at Patrick Henry Library in Vienna, VA.  The smell of books, of the cedar chips the house guinea pig had in his cage. Around the campfire at scouts- hearing ghost […]

 Look for things that do not seem to be explained well, or that do not kind much interest for you to become engaged with it.  Write a blog post summarizing what you found that might or might not work. Explain why you chose it. You do not need to have a perfect example, but show […]

Then, expand on what it might mean to introduce the word “digital”? What changes, is different, or is the same? What do you see or think of when we say “digital storytelling”  Finally, add the ideas you got from listening to this week’s videos by Ira Glass and Andrew Stanton- what, if any, might influence […]

I’m not a fan of boxing as a sport—I don’t do violence—but one of my favorite movies is 2010′s the Fighter, which chronicles the rise of Micky “Irish” Ward to the World Welterweight title in the 1990′s.  The film (which also happens to be a true story) follows two brothers- Micky and Dicky.  Dicky, the […]

Using the story spine is like a more advanced version of Pixar’s 4th rule.  Mapping the story this way helped me to see the importance of “the event”- namely when Micky breaks his hand defending his brother and loses almost all hope: The Story Spine Structure Function Once Upon a Time… Beginning There were two […]

It would probably follow one or more of the 22 rules Pixar uses to create appealing stories.  Numbers 4 and 16 stick out to me: #4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___. #16: What are the stakes? […]

What do you associate with the word storytelling? What is the visual that comes to mind? What experiences or memories does it conjure? Does it have any place in your life now? ——————————————————————– My concept of storytelling is that it is an exchange rooted in the foundation of our humanity and how we relate to those […]

Kurt Vonnegut explains an approach to portraying the shape of stories along the G-I (good fortune/ill-fortune) and B-E (beginning – end) axis.  During the clip he provides examples of generic, sinusoidal (cosine or sine, depending on the character’s starting point) stories that dip into (or out of) good and ill fortune. Vonnegut provides a more […]

… set up a demo WordPress Blog for the new class of DS106 I am teaching, and informally theming as “DS106 Goes to Work” cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Ian Sane This is because the students in the George Mason University course I am teaching, are all “road warriors” (that’s the […]