In a recent entry, I mused about whether pictures or words do a better job of telling a story. I’m seeing more and more in the storytelling realm about digital storytelling, and while I think that some aspects of digital narrative are a bit far afield from my interests in this blog, others – like the convergence of social media and storytelling as a way of constructing identity – are closely related to the topics I want to cover here, and I’ll be delving more into these areas in the coming weeks.
But just as a stunning example of what’s possible in the digital storytelling realm is the incredible series, The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris, who took photos at least every 5 minutes for the week of the tale, and then created what my grade-school bud Jeff Jarvis called “a stunning interface to display his 3,214 photos.” Stunning is right. This is the kind of visual display that makes you feel old because you could never imagine technology that would make this kind of storytelling possible. Jarvis, of Buzz Machine, wrote that he was undecided about the form.
I’m in awe of it. It shows us in a breathtaking way the power of digital storytelling. (Though I admit I didn’t go through all 3,214 photos).
Here’s what creator Harris said his purpose was in creating the story:
First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.). Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.