DIGITAL STORY MAKING: OUR JAPANESE STORY

January 22, 2022

DIGITAL STORY MAKING: OUR JAPANESE STORY

For the past two weeks, I have been working on our digital story with Ece Türesinler that could be used in an ELT classroom. We chose a Japanese story and changed the ending. From there, we wrote the outline of the story and then decided on the scenes. After that, we wrote down the lines and got working on the backgrounds and the characters. For this, we thought we could draw a few scenes but after the first scene took 2 hours to draw on Illustrator, we went back to Photoshop. We combined backgrounds and the character renders we had and made adjustments, namely the shadowing, the scaling and the colour - hue/saturation adjustments. This took a while. After that, we put our files on Camtasia Studio and arragend the transitions, animations and the speech bubbles. We put the appropiate music, sound effectts and graphical effects afterwards and used them in the studio. After this application, we narrated the story with Audacity and put that on. While we were rendering the file, we ran into a few errors as we wanted to ensure the quality of our work by going with a 30.000 Bitrate, the maximum amount the program promised, and the audio encoding being 320 Kbps but the program failed to render these. So we had to settle for 20k bitrate and 256 Kbps for the audio with the video itself being 60fps and 1080p. We proceeded put it on YouTube.

This took pretty long to complete since we wanted it to be as good as we could make it. We wanted to animate it properly but the lack of our computing power, or the lack of drawing tablets and the learning curve of the program being steep - as well as the time limit did not allow us to do so. This was a project and a half and though easier solutions for such a project could be found, I do not think they would be as good. For example, we could have drawn characters on paper and recorded ourselves when moving them about but I do not think they work as digital stories. Therefore, I think this activity was a big undertaking, and big motivators are needed in the field to get teachers to do this.

Ece's Post on our Digital Story

https://theedutechdiary.blogspot.com/2022/01/blog-post.html