Instructor: Hanson Hosein
Office: Room 251C, Communications Building
Office Hours: By Appointment
Contact: hosein at u.washington.edu
This is a pivotal time in the history of digital media. Inexpensive technology and powerful distribution networks mean nearly anyone can transmit their creations.
Since the advent of human communication, storytelling has been a key factor in our survival and development.
Over the last century, storytelling to an audience beyond our immediate social circle has largely been the preserve of industrialized, mass media. But now, with digital media, we can not only listen to new voices, we can be those new voices – leading some to conclude that we have entered into a new “Storytelling Age.”
Despite our newfound access to these tools of creation and distribution, effective communication still requires the timeless basics of effective storytelling – perhaps even more so given the exponential increase in new content competing for our limited attention.
In this hand-on, skills-oriented course, we'll explore what it takes to conceive, develop, create and distribute a compelling multimedia story.
Together, this class will produce a single, collaborative project that we will distribute through social networks, user-generated content sites, and film festivals. We'll employ consumer-level technology (including inexpensive flash video cameras and off-the-shelf editing systems) to build a groundbreaking, engaging narrative that can potentially reach a worldwide audience.
At the end of this course, we'll be able to:
- Identify the essential elements to successful storytelling.
- Engage in effective project management (storyboarding, scheduling).
- Use digital media to create and distribute our own multimedia stories.
- Identify legal, ethical and intellectual property issues related to media production.
Multimedia Storytelling will be valuable to anyone who's interested in using storytelling techniques to successfully convey a message to a target audience using digital media – whether you’re already a content producer, a business manager, a journalist, or just someone who wants a practical understanding of how digital media can be applied in communications.
See our work-in-progress as we push the limits on the Flip video camera at www.flipthemedia.com