Doing it Differently

Edublogs Challenge #5:  Create a story in 5-10 images.  Easy . . . or is it?  The option I chose was to create a story with 5-10 images and no words.

"Easy" is what I said when I started this challenge.  I quickly located some pictures that would work for this challenge and eagerly uploaded them into Animoto.  I LOVE Animoto and soon I was on automatic pilot busily creating my first video.  It had great captions/title slides that helped me tell my story.



I watched it and remembered that part of the challenge was to try not to use any words.  Okay, no problem. Animoto has an easy remix button, so I removed all the text slides except for the first (introduction) and the last (conclusion).  Surely they were necessary to tell my "visual" story.   Or were they?



I re-read the challenge again and realized that my story had more than 15 slides.  I would need to whittle my 18 slide story down to 10 (5 would be impossible) and AVOID words!  Was this possible?  Yes . . .I had to remove any slide that didn't contribute something important to my story.  However, I wasn't able to give up the first and last text slide as I decided they were important to my story.  My video went from 2:21 to 1:04  . . . I cut it in half! Here's my final draft.



What's the point?  Economy.  Economy is an important aspect of digitial storytelling.  Too often students (and adults) want to include every little detail into their stories.  More is better!  Right?!  Not exactly, I realized there's something to be said for simplifying story telling to just a few elements (5-10 images).  I've never had my students create a "story" with no words.  What a wonderful way to develop visual literacy and reinforce the learning styles of visual learners.  I think that using wordless books like Tuesday by David Wiesner and The Red Book by Barbara Lehman would be great models for stories like this.  Students could use Animoto, Photostory 3 or Movie Maker to create their stories.  

The lesson I learned from this challenge is I don't always need to have so many words in my blog entries.  I often include imagery in my blogs, but I don't use the principle of economy with my words.The longer a blog entry the better!  I realize that more WORDS isn't always better, sometimes more PICTURES can tell the story better.