Week 13 - Scholarly Article - Lambert

I am in my third semester of the graduate program in eLearning Design and Implementation at The University of Colorado, Denver. Each week we post a Scholarly Article Review for my Learning with Digital Stories course, ILT5340. This week I choose Chapter 9 - Designing in Digital: Working with Digital Imaging, Audio, & Video.

In Chapter 9 Designing in Digital, once again Joe Lambert simplifies the digital design process to a simple philosophy: mimic what you like. No need to over think principles that apply to professional technical excellence. Reserve that for those of us who aspire to win an academy award in cinematography. Can you hear my sigh of relief?

In chapter 5 Joe provides seven easy steps to creating profound stories. In this chapter he provides simple techniques like cropping, a companion website with more great tools and stories that touch your spirit with profound sadness and outrage and stories that makes you smile and think "I want to do that for my family."

As a budding digital storyteller Lambert’s easy instruction regarding how to transform a thought into an easy way to “see” the story is refreshing. He recommends sticking a picture everywhere there is a noun in your script. Example: When I was a child, use a picture of me as a child. We played in the woods; use a picture of woods. Now this may sound simple to some. For people like me who agonize over the perfect video, what picture(s) can convey all of these words on the page; focusing on the noun is like music to my ears.

The story Lambert uses as the example in this chapter is comprised of a series of ordinary pictures edited with simple cropping to make them original and perfect storytelling elements.

Narration, simple photos, and panning/zooming effects are the extent of technology used and the story Camaro Boy works!

The second example moves us away from our laptops and desktops and shows how effective a story captured on a Smartphone can be. This digital postcard looks easy enough to capture. I’m just not sure how to edit this on a Smartphone.

Regardless to my unresolved technical questions the resounding message I continuously received from Lambert is strip away non-essentials, keep it simple, provide a personal perspective to connect with others and move fearlessly forward.