Under the Magnifying Glass

Our Storytelling-Storycrafting Apparatus

By Steven H. Fyffe

Jared’s Imagination

Joseph said, “Come on, Fred”. Jared was playing with the nativity figurines and had given the shepherd a rather unique, albeit un-Biblical sounding name. Joseph then spoke to his beloved, “Come on Mary. Get the baby and come on”. Mary replied, “I’m coming, but I can’t stand up. I’m coming as fast as I can”. Mary was slowly making her way across the table on her knees. You see kneeling was a rather permanent condition for the nativity scene statuette of the Christ Child’s mother. Hearing his mom chuckling behind him, Jared became a little embarrassed and his imaginative story came to an abrupt end.

After Jared ate several animal cracker cookies, his mom told him, “You better eat all of your dinner tonight”. His reply, “I’m not sure I can … I have all these animals running around in my stomach”.

I began to pen this column on the day one sports writer wrote, “Browns Stadium was transformed into a super-sized snow globe”. (1) The blizzard conditions in Northeast Ohio on that Sunday certainly presented challenges for sports enthusiasts and players alike. To add insult-to-injury, the Bills even had to stay over night in snow covered Cleveland, after their loss to our team. Their charter flight was canceled and had to “shuffle off to Buffalo” on a bus the next day.

Although the weather outside was frightful, the fire in Jared’s heart was delightful. His excitement soared so high on that Sunday morning he could hardly contain himself. When he peered out the frosted window he yelled, “Look, mom, we got 81 inches of snow!” He immediately called his grandma to tell her he wanted us to take him out to play in the snow.

Right after he got out of kindergarten the next day, I went to his house to pick him up. Jared asked me how much snow was at grandma’s house. I told him we must have 92 inches … exaggeration comes naturally, you see. We rushed back to our house, so Jared could make snow angels and throw snowballs at Papa and Grandma, before having hot chocolate in front of our fireplace.

The Lord has blessed my grandson with quite a creative imagination, as you can see. He is always a source of joy for his grandma and me. My greatest desire is to see Jared grow to be a man after God’s own heart. My prayer is that we and his parents can nurture and encourage him to develop every skill, every creative instinct, every imaginative fiber the Lord has bestowed upon him. He is on a great adventure in pursuit of the ministry God has providentially laid out before him.

Indeed, we will encourage Jared to sharpen his investigation and communication skills, in order to tell the story of how the Lord has used him. I trust that someday a young one will crawl up in Jared’s lap and say, “Papa, tell me your story again”.

Storytelling and Storycrafting

Don’t you just love a good story! The art of storytelling has been valued for thousands of years, not only for entertainment, but also as a teaching tool. On the National Storytelling Network, one author writes, “Create connections between generations through the art of oral storytelling in order to pass on the wisdom, values, humor and sense of community embodied in stories of all cultures and all times”. (2)

In his essay, Effective Storytelling A manual for beginners, Barry McWilliams wrote, “Effective storytelling is a fine and beautiful art. A well-developed and presented story can cut across age barriers and will hold the interest and reach its listeners. Stories will be remembered long after other orations”. (3)

In Caitlin Fralick’s essay, How We Begin: Reading, Writing and Selfhood in Two Novels by E.L. Konigsburg, she wrote, “The storytelling motif permeates these books. Particular language furthers the author's idea of just what a story is: something that binds a community of like minds; a path toward inclusion in the face of difference; the completion of a puzzle in order to better situate oneself in the world”. (4)

As you may have noticed in my first four columns, I have attempted to write in a storytelling motif, introducing you to my grandson and myself with snippets from our life story. Granted, macCompanion’s focus is Macintosh computers, gadgets, software and other such geeky stuff. However, even nerds and a nerd-wannabe, like myself, have a story to tell.

In my storytelling motif, I have also introduced you to inductive learning as we explore the power of the Macintosh. I have turned to the mystery stories of the great detective Sherlock Holmes. He has been our mentor in the joy of inductive discovery. Notice in the quote above, McWilliams states, “Stories will be remembered long after other orations”. (3)

Orations, lectures, and sermons are all deductive in nature and have great value. There are many “Tips” articles and “How to” books which are purely deductive in nature which will certainly give any true nerd a shiver or two. Indeed, I devour them myself. I was in the front of the line to lay my hands on David Pogue’s Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual (5) as soon as it hit the shelves. Based upon his past works, I highly recommend it to your consideration.

Oh, but when you combine a good story and the joy of self discovery, and then season your soup with the desire to tell your own story … WOW! … your creative juices and memory neurons are really stimulated then.

Going hand in hand with storytelling is storycrafting. “in the art of storytelling and storycrafting, a very important way to learn is to simply listen - to many different stories told by many different tellers in many different ways”. (6)

Liisa Karlsson, in Storycrafting with children A key to listening and to sharing, wrote, “Human being is homo narrans, born as a teller. The storycrafting method is based on the idea that everybody has thoughts, information, and tales which no-one else has. Every person’s thoughts are valuable, worth listening to, interesting, and relevant to storycrafting. ... Storycrafting is a reciprocal method for sharing and listening to the thoughts of other people”. (7)

Segue

Now, what does all this have to do with Macintosh hardware and software?

When discussing oral storytelling, McWilliams went on to comment, “I have observed that our audiences have lost some of the skills to follow a narrated story and see things in their minds. Storytelling has become more difficult. Attention spans are shorter and more demanding, more sophisticated, yet less able to independently imagine or visualize. People seem to need more visual stimulation”. (3)

If that is the state of our culture, we need a little kickstart for our storytelling and storycrafting. Steve Jobs once described computers as “the equivalent of bicycles for our minds”. (8)

Steve Jobs, the driving force of both Apple and Pixar, certainly knows what storytelling and storycrafting is all about. The person who nominated Steve Jobs for an honorary degree at The University of Kings College in Nova Scotia wrote, “Journalists must first be storytellers. Since our ancestors’ earliest days, we’ve told stories about our dreams, our heroes and villains, our struggles, our lives and deaths. If we are to live together and understand our commonalities, we must have stories..."

"Jobs’ true legacy is that Apple technology empowers writers, photographers, artists, songwriters and filmmakers so they can create works of enduring beauty and tell our true stories. At both Apple and Pixar, Jobs … enjoys working with innovative minds who challenge and seek perfection, and artists recognizing the virtues of storytelling. … This visionary has given each of us an opportunity to change our lives. And in doing so, Jobs has given us the opportunity to change the world”. (9)

Storytelling-Storycrafting Apparatus

In this visual communication age, our storytelling and storycrafting are greatly enhanced by the digital magic of Apple computers and software. No artisan uses a single tool in his craft. What we need is an orchestra of tools both to tell our story and to record and share the stories of others. The on-board dictionary in OS X suggests the appropriate term: “Apparatus refers to a collection of distinct instruments, tools, or other devices that are used in connection or combination with one another for a certain purpose”. For example, the Lord gave us a “breathing apparatus” which orchestrates the passage of oxygen from the atmosphere into our blood stream. Likewise, the finely integrated digital apparatus of our Macs and Apple software pumps a breath of fresh air into our life stories.

It all begins with Keynote 4

With what does our storytelling-storycrafting apparatus begin. Keynote 4 (10) is at heart a storytelling tool. I have often recommended Keynote to my friends. However, they often respond by saying they do not do presentations. Keynote is so much more than just a “presentation” program used by a teacher or business person.

Let’s ask ourselves what we need to visually tell our story. A good place to begin is to set the mood for our story. Keynote themes does this for us and even allows revisions along the journey.

Next, written words, not just for titles, communicate the details of our story. Text entry and placement are easy on our visual story board. If you do choose to orally tell your story before an audience … yes, that might be called a presentation, but don’t be scared off yet … you can include not only text for the audience to read, but also notes which will serve as reminder as you speak. You can even export your story as a self-presenting Quick Time movie with either the speech synthesis of OS X reading your notes or recording them yourself.

What else do we need? How about photos? Smart Builds in Keynote 4, allows you to add several photos on each slide.

Multiple audio clips may be added to each slide, also. For example, as I tell of my fathers roots in the hills of Kentucky in the 1920s, I can add sound bites from the era. You can also include a musical score behind your story.

Since we are using visual communication to tell our story, video clips are a natural. Keynote is unique in allowing multiple video layers on the same slide. You can even have one movie play on top of another movie. Imagine showing a movie of your train ride through Colorado or your bus ride through the Irish countryside, while in a corner of the screen you narrate the adventure with a video clip. Your story is so much more engaging with Picture-in-Picture narration. Now, you can accomplish with an application costing less the $100, visual techniques often seen on television.

Our Storytelling-Storycrafting Apparatus on Steroids

However, Keynote alone does not make up our storytelling-storycrafting apparatus. The digital resources for our story and the mechanism for digitally sharing our life story are orchestrated by several other integrated applications.

The new and enhanced features in Leopard (11) such as Spaces, Spotlight, Quick Look, Preview, and Quick Time make the organization of our digital resources a breeze.

Likewise, iLife ‘08 (12) works in conjunction with Keynote. In iPhoto, we can create Events and albums of the photos which we plan to use in the Keynote tale of our life adventures. iMovie will facilitate moving your Keynote story to the web after exporting it to a Quick Time movie. iMovie can also be used to publish the Quick Time movie to iTunes for streaming to your HDTV over Apple TV (13). iWeb allows us to include our Keynote story on our own personal web page.

Apple’s .Mac (14) allows us to put our stories in Web Galleries to share with family and friends. Unlike similar services, .Mac is fully integrated with iLife.

There are several other applications which give you a truly elegant storytelling-storycrafting apparatus with Keynote. For example, I have used Apple’s Final Cut Express which includes LiveType (15), Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 (16), The Printshop (17), Comic Life Deluxe (18), Amadeus Pro (19), Snapz Pro X (20), Photo-to-Movie (21), and Photo Presenter (22) to empower my Keynote stories.

Apple hardware and software all work together as an integrated mechanism … talk about a bicycle for our minds … our own storytelling-storycrafting apparatus.

To be continued

I have not abandoned my quest to discover Leopard which I started last month in Under the Magnifying Glass (23) and will share more with you in coming columns. However, I hope you enjoyed our trip together down this rabbit trail. After all, when you think about it, storytelling and storycrafting is at the center of why we so enjoy our Macs, is it not?

I’m sure you have family and friends who would love to hear your story. Likewise, I want to leave my grandson, Jared, with the rich story of his roots. Besides, I want him to be able to tell his grandchildren the story of his silly old Papa.

Please come back next month and sit a spell. You all take care now.

References

(1) http://www.sportingnews.com/yourturn/viewtopic.php?t=319302

(2) http://www.storynet.org/Resources/LinksList/

(3) http://www.eldrbarry.net/roos/eest.htm

(4) http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr559f/04-05-st1/portfolios/C_Fralick/media/konigsburg.pdf

(5) http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529529/

(6) http://www.thestorytreecompany.com.au/workshops.html

(7) http://www.edu.helsinki.fi/lapsetkertovat/lapset/In_English/Karlsson.pdf

(8) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c

(9) http://smartlikestreetcar.com/?p=65

(10) http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/