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I’m in the process of redesigning my blog. I’ve gone through a few rounds with some of my super designer friends who have been advising me on developing a logotype (a lot more work than expected for an amateur!). These are my top six. Now I gotta narrow it down to ONE and I figured I could get a little outside perspective.

Rule #3 Share it with an Audience

Another rule in The Five Obstructions is that Leth must show his films to Von Trier and be present for his critique (they drink champagne and eat caviar for every showing). Von Trier is Leth’s audience. The embodiment of his critic increases the pressure but also fuels Leth’s labor to impress his friend.

A similar dynamic took place in our independent class. Having a group created an audience, and encouraged the peer-pressure to show up with a product that was interesting. Additionally, sharing with a group pushed us all to experiment with new techniques, subjects and processes. It also helps the creator better craft a story because you can see how the public receives the message.

When you witness how people watch your videos, when they lose interest, how their body-expression changes and what they tell you about it, you become much more aware of choices in your craft.

Holding critique sessions with a consistent audience is one of the most effective learning tools for digital storytelling

Having a study group proved to be a rich learning opportunity to explore digital storytelling. For a novice like me, it was a great opportunity to experiment and accelerate my learning with video production. It was not only fun, but challenging. There were times where I was unable to produce something of quality and I was aware of my shortcomings, but each week was a new chance to try something new out. So there.

Rule #2 Find a Story you connect with

Throughout most of The Five Obstructions, it is unclear why Leth subjects himself to this tortuous exercise. But at the end we discover that this is a therapeutic process to help him come out of his depression and get in touch with his real emotions in the storytelling process. Von Trier wants Leth to produce something honest from his heart, not his head.

I only started making videos six months ago, and before that all my creative endeavors were creative writing, dancing and doodling. With these hobbies it was fairly easy to me to access my heart and enjoy the process. But in making videos, I got caught up in the gadgets, the software, the codecs, and more.

After watching the Five Obstructions film I recognized that I needed to find an honest story to connect with. I made “Bare Loss,” a video about a very recent miscarriage in high chroma-key (as we had decided that week).

Making Bare Loss made me forget about using the Flip, Final Cut Pro and my iMac. I was so connected to the story that when I started editing the visual decisions became obvious. The music, the lighting and the crops I used were all part of my story, and it was a very intuitive process: trying out editing tricks to find what ‘felt’ right and helped convey the story. It was making something from my heart instead of my head.

It is true that technology is getting easier to use and practically anybody can do a video. But with so many stories published, the tools become irrelevant and the craft of the story emerges — even if most people are unconscious about them.

We look for digital stories that either create empathy through emotion (such as, anger, laughter, sadness, etc.), or are timely and relevant (like the South Asian tsunami and the Virginia Tech shootings), or that are personally related to us (a friend, a family member, a classmate perhaps). This is no different than any other medium.

In order to create these stories one must really connect with the message and let it carry you through the shooting, the editing and the compression.

Thus, when I think of teaching digital storytelling to others, four important components come to mind:

1. Learn the craft of a story: voice, point of view, plot and characters
2. Learn the how the metaphoric power of the visual elements: the picture plane, fonts, color
3. Learn the rhythm: pacing of the visuals and music (or lack of)
4. DO IT

These components make up the language of digital storytelling and are part of crafting the message. The tools (the camera, the editing software, lights, etc.) are much less important to teach because they are becoming so easy to manipulate that just having a project (with some constraints) is enough to pick up a camera and try it out. Technical know-how allows you to have more tools to express yourself, but it is by far the least difficult element in digital storytelling.

Ever stared at the metaphorical white page in MS Word pondering what to write? In my second storytelling class I learned that the biggest constraint for creativity is the infinite number of possibilities from having no constraints (the white space).

Rule #1: Set Rules
Every week, for the last twelve weeks, we had to produce a video – a self-imposed requirement. The most successful videos came from an assigned theme or a rule. Having a rule or parameter was the biggest jump-start to creating a video, but I didn’t understand why until we watched The Five Obstructions (2003).

The film depicts a director (Lars Von Trier) who makes his mentor (Joergen Leth) redo his movie — the Perfect Human (1967) — five times, following different constraints each time. In every instance, Leth outsmarts the limitations and produces an incredible film. It was amazing to watch the same film rendered in such different ways, and every time it was jaw dropping good. This was only possible because Leth had to follow the obstructions imposed on him by Von Trier.

Rules give us something to press against and therefore movement happens. When a dancer needs to jump, he must plié to press against the floor so he will spring into the air. Without applying the pressure into the floor there will be no jump.

Jeff Khadavi is the founder of the soon to be born GoTime.com, a site that leverages social network, data mining and venue info to do answer the quintessential question of what’s going on tonight.

He came to one of my class at UW and proudly announced his Columbia MBA drop-out status. He knew that he would immediately gain respect as an entrepreneur and innovator. “We just got together, my two friends from MIT and I and we came to Seattle to do follow execute our vision.” Yes, inspiring.

The idea is not bad, they know they are not the first social network site, nor the first local info site out there, and as Jeff said the difference is in the execution. Facebook was not the first website to connect people. So they have a business model that has a few revenues streams, the main one is charging venues for their info (basic services are free) and then once they have users they expect to get some bigger advertising. They are funded and Jeff is confident of having a solid idea that is focused and targeted.

Though I liked the functionality of the site and I applaud the switch of names form ‘night riot’ to ‘go time’. I think they are lacking a bit of female perspective in their design. A quick survey on the reactions in class and it was clear to me that I wasn’t the only woman that didn’t find the site appealing, the general feeling was that the site is for guys looking to get laid. One classmate said: “I can imagine a Axe Body Spray on the side bar”.

At first I thought I was just too old (I’m an ancient 32) for the site, which given the content I was ok with, but when I realized the general feeling was not just age but gender, I started to question whether they are too targeted and focused. So let’s run some creative numbers:

US Census for Seattle shows about 173K people between 20-34 years old.

—–> About half are female… let’s say they appeal to 50% of women, then the ones under 21 are no good (drop 10K or so) and finally I would argue that people beyond 30 or married won’t be to attracted to the site (drop another 20K).

So —-> I’m guesstimating that their audience here is really about 100K, which is close to what Jeff said he needs to approach a serious advertiser (that’s assuming they can get a large % of their audience on board).

—– > I would strongly advise gotime.com that they modify not just their name but their identity to be a little more broad appealing if the want to have a significant web presence, unless they really can operate with the super targeted, super engaged model.

Jeff proposes that they can monetize on the venues with a fairly low number of users because they are essentially creating a direct channel to very interested consumers that have declared big fans of the venue (aka opted in). This is hypothetically true: very targeted, very interested customers yield high response. But I don’t know enough of their prices, nor their services to understand what would make a venue upgrade to the paid service.

That brings me to my last unanswered question: How they plan to bring in people to their site? I can imagine a social networking site ramps up fairly quickly, but with all the social sites out there I’m not sure if the adoption rate is so quick anymore.

Overall, I think gotime.com has a neat site with interesting functionality, and a business model that is experimenting with monetizing social networks (not just the hope of advertising) without being too yucky about it. I’m keen to see how it goes!

As a follow up to my last post, I got this article “Research funds for technophiles” by Mark Bauerlein. He criticizes the tech fanatism (the author takes some stabs at some of my favorite people like Jenkjins and boyd) which fails to address the central question of how digital media is changing learning.

In part I agree with the author, the tech fanatism seems prevalent in many areas, not just learning. And we get distracted with all the cool things that we can do with new toys, to the point that we claim: Technology is changing everything!

Is it? and if it is… how? That’s the big question.

Regardless, I’m not sure traditional research can arrive at conclusive findings on these matters. It seems to me that a lot of people are writing anecdotally about digital media and trying to diagnose what is going on, but few actually come up with an answer as to the impact or the predictions. Well, isn’t it a bit early for that?

Therefore, I think we are just in an experimental phase and academia like many other organizations are just trying things out to see how it works, so in that sense I’m all for MacArthur and any other organization that funds concrete initiatives for digital learning or digital civic engagement or whatever other digital social thing we can come up with.

Every where I turn there seems to be a foundation, organization or center developing curriculum to teach kids how to develop their digital skills. I confess I’m very skeptical of whether we really need this, though I’m recognize that there are tremendous divides among the different social, economical and mental abilities among young people and perhaps this is the main reason why we need to develops new educational standards that include digital skills. Not everyone can pick up a computer and figure out how to blog…

But I’m skeptical that institutions can answer those needs by developing self-tutorials that really speak to the diverse conditions of youth around the world (or even just the U.S.) and I’m wondering how does all this fit in with the idea (one I love) of shifting the focus of the classroom from the teacher to the students.

(photo by ne, license under cc from Flicker)

I found this presentation on Slideshare and found it to be right on the money and provocative.

**UPDATE**

As you can see I got a comment back from the author of this presentation, Paul Isakon. I wrote him back to thank him for articulating how the marketing IS the product. How many times have you found yourself trying to make up some ‘value added’ campaign that would make a product or service look attractive to customers, when it fundamentally wasn’t. But how do you go back to the product owner and tell him/her: “well, here’s the best marketing strategy I can come for you: re-think your product.” Take a look to Paul’s ppt and you might get a good solid argument for these situations.

I also asked Paul for some more insight into new ways to research since I’m having to review all kinds of research methods for my “Research Strategies & Methods” class. Prof. Kathy Gill gave a lecture on using social networks and research (click here to see her slides) and I found it super-interesting (anything but focus groups, please!).

Lately I’ve been wondering why is entertainment so successful on the web. It seems to be the magic formula to making something viral or getting a lot of hits (that or pure controversy). You wouldn’t be sending your friends product recommendations (lame) but you sure will send them a little funny video like this:

Advertisers have long known that entertaining audiences is a great way to get their attention. Humor is commonly used device in ads and perhaps the most memorable one. Scott Karp comments how this is now fueling a new wave of interactive and entertaining web advertising. Click here to see the article.

So now we’re all talking about conveying information through entertainment, as if we all needed sugar to pass the natural bitterness of coffee. Hence we have make up words like. ‘infotainment’ or ‘advetainment’, and my favorite, ‘edutainment’

Why is this? Why do we need to entertain to get attention? Is this detracting from the core message?
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