This week, I took the Five Steps to MultiMedia Storytelling course at News University. Before I took this course, I had never studied anything similar to this. In my journalism classes, I was taught how to write for news and magazines and a little broadcast writing too but nothing similar to this.
The thing that surprised me the most about multimedia stories is that multimedia stories also are nonlinear. They engage the readers by letting them choose which elements to read and when to read them. In my past experience I have always been taught to tell a story in chronological order from beginning to end. In some cases with journalism you might tell the ending first just to keep the reader interested but then you go right back to chronological order.
I also learned how to make a storyboard. The only time I have ever seen storyboards and how they are made in when I was watching behind the scene clips from various movies. It was interesting to see a storyboard from a news perspective. I like the idea that you can use many different mediums in one story and you are not so confined. You can use video, animated graphics, maps, audio, text, and/or photography. I think it is good that a storyboard can be simply a rough draft to your final work. Like the workshop said, it is not written in stone; it is fluid and can be changed as the process goes on.
The only thing that I would have liked to have seen more of in this workshop was examples. I saw the example of the Death Valley dancing rocks but the link to the site was incorrect and took you somewhere unrelated. But even if the link had worked correctly I think it would have been good to have another multimedia story to compare it to.
Overall I think that this was a good course and it served its purpose as far as showing the steps to multimedia storytelling.
