Create A Digital Story

Digital stories are videos that combine audio, images, and videos clips to tell a story.

Digital stories can be used to:

• explain a concept,
• reflect on a personal experience,
• retell a historical event, or
• make an argument or share a perspective.

Digital stories are typically three minutes long. 

This tutorial has multiple modules to help work your way through the steps below, including

• What is Digital Stoytelling
• Scripting + Storyboarding
• Finding Media
• Using Audacity to Record Audio

• Brainstorm ideas about potential directions and approaches to your digital story. 
• Research your topic. 
  • Find sources to help you provide context and more thoroughly understand your topic. 
  • If it's personal: Ask questions of your friends and family, read journals or letters, look for photographs, or anything else that may bring more depth to your memories. 
• Review what you’ve discovered and decide on the story, and perspective, you want to share. 

Scripting and storyboarding will help you plain out both the narrative and the visuals for your video, making the production phase more seamless.

• Find or create a script template to get started. 
• Depending on your own personal process, some people find it easier to start with script or storyboard first. There is no right or wrong way to approach it.
• Remember that this is just a starting point and you can revise and change your ideas as you go. 
• For inspiration, search for images on your topic and see how they can be incorporated.

It can be hard to hear people’s opinions about your work, but taking the time to get feedback can truly make a difference in the final product. As you are getting feedback, remember:

• It is not personal
• It does not impact your value as a person
• It is simply how someone has experienced your work

To help frame the feedback, and make it more helpful for your purpose, come up with specific questions: 

• What do you think about the introduction? Is there anything that you would change? Do you think it is attention grabbing?
• Is this language too vague? Is the audience able to follow this plot through to the end? 
• I’m going to have repeated elements of red throughout the video. I hope I highlighted this enough in the storyboard. Do you think I should add more red to make it more obvious? 

You can also have more general questions:

• How does the script and storyboard make you feel? 
• Is there a distinct voice in the narration? 
• Do you care about what happens? 

Also feel free to give parameters to your reviewers: 

• I really want your feedback on the structure and flow of the script. I’m really happy with most of the visuals I’ve come up with and would be happy to keep them the way they are. 
• I’ve been really intentional with the sound effects and music. Can you let me know if it works with the narrative arc? 

Remember, getting feedback is to help you understand how someone else is experiencing your script and storyboard. It is opinion and you can take it or leave. 

Depending on your script and storyboard, you may need to:

• Record your voiceover
• Gather or create images or video clips
• Create or find music and sound effects

You may have done some of this work during your researching and storyboarding steps. In this step, you make decisions about what works best and if you need to find or create additional media. 

Gather all your media together and bring it into whatever tool you use to edit video. 

• Insert your audio voiceover first and then start adding images, video clips and other media to match the timings of your audio. 
• Don’t forget to include a credits slide to provide proper attribution to the creators of any image, video clip, sound or music that you used. 
• Once you’re happy with the timings and look of your video, you can export it and share.