Welcome to the future of web stories and narratives. Don´t worry if you´ve never heard of multimedia storytelling until now because I was just enlightened the other week. Basically, it is a story of text, video clips, audios, photographs, and graphics put on a web page in a non-linear format. What makes multimedia storytelling so different is that the story is presented in a non-linear format. What this means is that the story is not held to a classical text structure. The article won´t be presented as a bunch of chronological pages of text with a few images or videos to compliment them. Instead, a multimedia storyteller arranges the videos, images, graphics, animations, etc. in the most compelling and interactive way for the reader. The reader can bounce around to the different aspects of the multimedia story and navigate the story in the way that is most fitting to them. In my opinion this method totally beats the old school “CNN” type of text article. It puts creativity into the hands of the storyteller and the different combinations and possibilities are almost endless. It might take a little time to get adjusted to this new format, but I have found the multimedia storytelling to be much more compelling and interesting to me. One multimedia story I watched in one of my classes went into depth about the Taliban. It is broken up into different chapters where you can look at different Taliban interviews or even what their views of the world are. This story had me clicking around and watching for an hour or so, so I thought I´d post the link to see what you guys thought of multimedia storytelling and this example in particular.
As Told By Rossi 