 So welcome again. This is Tools for Digital Storytelling. My name is Camie Griffiths, and we are really excited to bring this presentation to you today. Before I get started, I want to tell you a little bit about TechSoup. We are working towards a time when every nonprofit and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology resources and knowledge they need to operate at their full potential. Here is a screen grab of our home page. There's a lot of great things going on here once my screen shows up. Excellent. For those of you who might not spend much time on our website, I want to point out a couple of great things. You should check out our Learning Center. It has articles and our archive of webinars. We've got a blog with interesting posts that go up on a daily basis. If you're looking for products, you get donations from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Symantec, and we redistribute them to nonprofits and libraries for a very low cost. This is a donation program. We have a couple of newsletters that if you haven't already signed up for, I would encourage you to do that. So without any further ado, this is the kickoff for our Digital Storytelling event. We did have one webinar last week, and this is the follow-up talking specifically about tools. But we are hoping that you will take time to submit a story to our Digital Storytelling Challenge. We've got Megan from TechSoup who will tell you more about that at the end of the call. And this was our webinar from last week. It was a really great webinar specifically on how to tell your Digital Story. You would have received a link to this in some of the messaging, but you'll also receive a link to this recording in the follow-up message that I'll send to you later today. Now to introduce our wonderful speakers, we've got Melissa Raleigh and Erica B. Morales. And they've put together a wonderful presentation for you today. So I'd like to take a minute to do some quick introductions. Melissa, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. Thanks, Kami. Hi everyone. Welcome to the webinar. For the most part, I've been a journalist focused on social enterprise. I mainly concentrate on the intersection between brands, entertainment, and nonprofits. But I'm also very vested in social enterprise for-profit and nonprofit as well as corporate social responsibility, which we've seen for a number of years doing business news and entertainment. And I'm very happy to be moved over to the digital side because it's just more individualistic. And I think it's a great way to harness the power and the compassion that's out there for you to tell your story. Great. Thanks, Melissa. And Erica B. Morales, can you please introduce yourself? Yeah, good morning everyone. My name is Erica Tavia Morales, and I'm a youth worker in the Bay Area. So I've been working with social benefit organizations since 2000 and was introduced to digital storytelling in 2005 as a volunteer. It's been an amazing way for people to share their stories. The tools are simple, so I'm really excited to be sharing, to be co-presenting with Melissa and sharing with you guys the fun that we have in doing this work. Excellent. Thank you. And before we begin, I'd like to do a quick poll. This is the same poll that we launched last week. Take a second to click on as many that apply to you. What motivates you to take on a digital storytelling challenge? Are you doing it to raise money? To grow your membership? Are you trying to shift public perception? Create staff or internal alignment? Engage your tribe of followers or other, which of course other could be lots of different things. So I'm going to skip to results. I'm not sure if you guys can see those results on your end. I can see them on my end. But I'm going to give folks a few seconds to plug in their information. So far, most everyone is engaging their tribe of supporters. And the second rounder up is shifting public perception. I'm glad you all can see the results. So I'm going to close the poll if anyone has any last things to submit. I am closing it. There you go. So clearly everyone is, or most everyone here is trying to engage their supporters. And I know we're going to spend some time talking about that. So let's move right into where do we start? Erica, Melissa? Excellent. So we know that digital storytelling can be a little intimidating for the beginner. And if you see in the slide, it's a jumble of different information. But basically we're going to run through the pre-production, what you should do to be prepared to create your digital story, production, all the tools that you need to put your pieces together, and then what to do once your story is created. So let's jump right into the first slide, pre-production. So if we look at pre-production, it takes up four steps. You want to have your story idea. You want to have a share production plan. You want to make sure you have a solid story and script, and then you want a storyboard. Melissa, what should we do once our script is written? Once your script is written, you really want to have an idea of the end product. So that is why it's very important that we work backwards. Since your script is already going to be nicely organized, and you're going to have your visual elements as well as your sound elements, graphics, anything, any of the pieces that go to this puzzle, you just want to be able to work backwards. So you want to go into a shoot. You want to go into interviewing somebody, already knowing the questions that you want to ask the subject, already knowing the kind of responses you're hoping to get, already knowing the kind of footage that you're hoping to put into your digital story. This is going to save you a lot of time and struggle, and it's really going to help you just be more efficient in your overall digital storytelling. Yeah, and once you have the story plan ready to go, we want to make sure that your story is less than two minutes. You can put a lot in that two minute time period. And if you're editing a piece for the first time, you can plan about an hour to edit each minute. Your story should have a beginning, middle, and end depending on what your format is. And also have a storyboard. And a storyboard is basically the plan for the images and video that's going to illustrate your story. You can use a piece of paper and divide it into two columns. So if you look at the simple storyboard, breaking it down to Mary had a little lamb. So we have the text or the script on the left-hand side, whatever sound you want in the background or music. And then on the right-hand side is what image or video you're going to use to illustrate that part of the story. This next example is basically a handwritten version of the storyboard. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it should have a decent idea of what you want to illustrate. So on the left-hand side again, the script and the images on the right-hand, or the script and the sound. And then on the right-hand side, an idea of what you're going to use for your digital story for that part of the script. And then just a simple sketch. You'll have time to create, illustrate, or curate your images later. But this is the basic plan, have that solid plan. Anything you wanted to add Melissa? No, just that, as long as you have the general story idea there, and as long as you have the script messed up with the visuals, once you get into the editing part, which we will be going over in a couple of minutes, it's going to make much more sense. When you see it on paper, it might not come together for you visually, but once you're sitting in the editing system and looking at all of your video and listening to the audio in the book, you'll be okay. So you have all of that gathered, then you're ready to jump into production mode. You want to get your voiceover, and you want to collect your images and video. With voiceover, since this is the basis of your story, you want to make sure that when you create that voiceover that you actually read your story or your script with the emotion of the piece that you want to convey to your audience. Sometimes people will look at their script and then they'll read it like a robot, like they've never seen those words before. So make sure that you first the script and get the emotion behind it. You also want to be sure that you have no other ambient sound, so this way the voice remains the important part of what you're recording. So if your ear hears any air conditioning, any machines in the background, any ambulances, any other people distracting noise, you want to wait until there's enough quiet so this way you can record the talent that is doing the voiceover. And two suggestions that we have for recording audio, you can use a digital voice recorder which you can get between $25 and $300. You can use your mobile phone recorder. A lot of our phones record really good audio quality. And then you can edit or clean up that audio in a tool like Audacity. So here's an example. One more thing to remember to make sure your cell phones and any gadgets that you bring on your suits are turned off other than the ones that you're using. Not only will the cell phones vibrate and cause some ambient noise, but also they might interfere with the technology that you're using. So just turn everything off that you're not using. Yes, yes. And here's an example of a digital voice recorder. Again you can connect it just like you can a digital camera to a computer and a USB voice digital voice recorder. And it just does really good sound and allows you to be mobile with your digital recording. And here's an example of free software. It's Cross Platform Audacity. So once you have that voice over recorded, you can upload it to your computer and you can clip out any bits that you don't need and just make it a clean voice over to have for your digital project. So once you have the sound, you're going to switch over to your images and video. The next thing is you're going to take that storyboard and you're going to create, capture, and collect any of the images that you need to tell your story. When I work with my students and with my educators, we work with still quality images. So they create two-dimensional images. They scan them. Or to speed up the process we actually take photographs of those images using either a Kodak EasyShare or just a simple digital camera. For my students who tend to be procrastinators, we actually use the PhotoBoost camera on the MacBooks that they use. But you want to get a high quality image. If you're using your cell phone, again you want to make sure that you have high quality images. If it looks grainy on your little screen, when you stretch it across the computer it will also look grainy. So just make sure that you're using high quality images when you use those digital devices to take that image quality. So what about our video quality? Yeah, so shooting techniques, if you're using a flip cam or any other kind of camcorder, if you currently have one, if you're about to buy one, definitely experiment and play. Definitely play with the different shooting styles. If you're opening your piece with a location, you want to establish the location with a wide shot. And then zoom in. Movement is very crucial in the video because nobody likes looking at stagnant still shots non-stop. Now when you're editing and using transitions which you'll get into in a minute you'll be able to make the overall piece much prettier. And as I like to say, turn water into wine. But the overall shooting, there are different things you can do, zooming in, zooming out, panning left to right. Panning means moving from one side to the other. And then you can also tilt up and down. And definitely experiment. You can get creative. Not everything needs to look like a local news broadcast as long as the vision is really clear and that you can get a strong understanding that's going to evoke some emotion from what you're doing. And just a final piece. A lot of people like to play with the different visual effects either with stills or video. You want to make sure that whatever images that you're capturing actually illustrates your point. So it's fun to experiment. But if you've taken the picture of the cat and made it look into a squirrel that might not convey to the audience. So just be careful when you're playing around with all the different visual effects. And we have some tool suggestions for you. So you can use any digital camera you can spend anywhere from $15 to about $200 and that will give you decent quality. And we highly recommend you having a tripod because your hand makes micro movements and you may not get the clearest image that you can as well as with your video cameras. And there are two really simple video cameras that we recommend. Melissa, will you talk about the Kodak Z18, please? Sure. The Kodak Z18 is very similar to the Flip. It's a little bit larger and heavier in size. You can do more with zooming. And what I do like about the Z18 is that you can plug in an external microphone. With a flip camera you do not have that option. But both flip camera and Z18 are great because they're portable. They're easy to use and they're very easy to download into the video. Z18 though, if you really want an external mic system, that's the best way to go. And then of course the flip video camera. It's really easy to use. USB uploads directly to your computer. And you'll notice that on TechSoup if your organization is eligible you can get two flip video cameras and a tripod for $175. And these cameras usually run about $150. So that's a pretty amazing deal. Some of the online tools that I can suggest if you want to illustrate and you're like, no, I don't want to use a pencil on a paper or a marker on a paper. SumoPaint is an online free image editor. So you can create your own illustrations on SumoPaint or you can upload any photographs or images that you have and modify it in there. Which is pretty amazing. It's very similar to like a Photoshop only. And then if you want to look for images that you can use that are copyright free you can go to the Creative Commons search engine. And in that you can look for images, you can look for music, and you can look for video. All that you can use in your own projects that are copyright free you just need to give credit to those original artists. That's a resource for you to resource different images. Let's move on to that second part of production. So we have all of our assets, Melissa. What are we going to do next once we have all of our pieces? Okay, so I mentioned earlier the fun part is turning all of the water into wine. So you have your footage. You've captured your interviews. You have an idea of the overall piece because you're working backwards. So now what you're going to do is upload the video from your camera into your computer so that you can begin editing. You can use Flip Video Software. You can use Final Cut Pro. You can use iMovie. I use iMovie because it is free and it came with my MacBook. Thank you. So this is somewhat technical and I know you don't have all the devices in front of you, but one thing to really keep in mind so if you've got a Z18 or a Flip Cam and as Erica mentioned, you can plug it directly from the USB into your computer. When you go into iMovie, you're going to go to File up in the left-hand corner. Thank you. And it's going to say Import, Import Audio. This is something that I did not know and I played around with iMovie for about 5 hours until I realized it was there. Now iMovie has instructions and we're going to be sending you different tutorials that you can use so that you don't have to be lost like I was. But definitely go to Import right there and then all of your footage from your camera will be imported into the deck in iMovie. And once it's there, you can start playing around with it, manipulating, and getting into the actual editing part, the fun part. And I just want to reiterate, if you're working with spills, you can drag and drop your spills into the interface. So if you are working with other than video footage and you have your JPEGs or GIFs, PNGs, or any of those still formats, you can drag those files directly into your interface and then start editing from there. Now let's turn that water into wine, Melissa. Okay, so everything, all of your footage is in iMovie. And since you already have your script written, you can start playing with the Bevel and the interviews. Now there are different formats, there are different story formats that you can do. You can do narrative, meaning that you're having a voiceover and you're having someone tell the story. You're telling the story with your script, including sound, bites, and music and footage. But you can also have a different story format where you're just having the people that you're interviewing tell the story. We're going to show you a couple of examples of a video where it's just sound bite after sound bite. It's really compelling because it's people talking about what activism means to them. We'll get to that in a minute. But once the video is in iMovie, Final Cut, or Flip, you're going to be able to see options to start dragging the video from basically the pool of video that you have into a timeline. Your timeline is where you start to lay down the order of the footage and sound bites. And all the footage is called your B-roll, basically. Your still image is also called B-roll. It means broadcast. On the separate line, you're going to have the A-roll, which is anything audio. So that's where you're going to be keeping track and organizing the music, the sound effects, and the sound bites. And one basic format that you can consider for your digital story, when you first put that story together, you want to put your clips in order of the storyboard. And you'll find that you might have to match your images to your audio track. So you might have to make a clip longer. You might have to make a clip shorter. Different software, and we neglected to mention Movie Maker. Sorry for the Windows users. That's another free software that you can use to edit video on a Windows machine. You want to put those clips in order. You want to match those images to your audio track. And honestly, that can take the longest bit of editing, just making sure that you're matching your images to your voiceover. And a basic story format, you want to have opening credits. You want to introduce the piece to your audience. Then you'll put your clips in footage. So if the opening credits are like one side of the sandwich, the top part of the bread, clips in the footage, or all of the condiments, all of the meat, tofu, whatever, just the flavor of the sandwich. And then you want to include the closing credits. You want to acknowledge the rules and the resources. So if you had a director, if you had a writer, or if you use certain video clips, audio clips, or images from another resource, you can include that. And then close with your copyright because you should be proud of your work. In between you can sprinkle transitions because transitions allow you to move from one part of your story to another. It's just smoother on the eye and the audience gets it versus a jump cut. And depending on your editing style, that might be appropriate. Right. And one thing I'd like to add when it comes to implementing the transitions into your piece is this is your time to be really creative with this, in addition to integrating music into it. If you want a very smooth mellow tone to a certain part of your story, then you might use a dissolved transition. If you are starting to really want to evoke excitement in the piece, then you might use something a little bit more, I guess, staccato is the term. You don't want it jumpy, and you don't want it jarbled. You want everything to be smooth. But there are different transitions that will enhance the tone of your piece and really start to evoke the kind of emotion that you want to have in your viewers. And really play with those transitions and really play with music as well. You'll find that if you have a story, you can change the way it feels by putting different sound effects or different music with your story. Play around with maybe starting your piece with one piece of music to evoke an emotion. And then at the end of the piece you may have a resolution. You may have a different feeling. You may want to engage your audience and say, now I want to do something. Inspire them with a different piece of music. All of those non-verbal cues really add effect and emotion to your piece. Just to review some free resources where you can get sound effects and music, the free Sound Project is a website where you can download and get free music for your projects as well as sound effects. I really like the Flash Kit website for really cool funky sound loops that are short and sweet. So if you don't need a 5-minute song maybe you find a 30-second piece here. And again, just to remind you of the Creative Commons search engine because that also has audio sound effects that you can find. So Melissa, now that we've done your best friend. Exactly. So we've put all of our pieces together. We've watched it several times. What should we troubleshoot for Melissa just in case? What should we watch for to make sure that our piece is actually what we want to produce? Okay, very great question. You really want to make sure everything is spelled correctly. When you title your interview subject, when you title the name of a foundation, when you give people credit, and the opening credits as well as the closing credits, make sure everything is spelled correctly. I know it sounds like common sense but there are so many errors that occur in national news, local news, and in videos that you see on YouTube just really make sure that it's paused and the professional is looking. On kind of a technical note, you want to make sure that you don't have any jump cuts in the video. Erica touched on jump cut really briefly. A jump cut is something that you see maybe when you're watching a local news broadcast and you're watching somebody talk and then all of a sudden instead of a nice smooth transition into a different shot, it jumps and there's kind of a break in the screen. If that's there, you want to re-edit it. Definitely re-edit it because it just looks unprofessional and you're using this to draw on potential funders. So you want to be as college and professional as possible. Once you're done with your piece, then you're going to export it. And again, we're using iMovie as an example of the screenshots but any of your editing software with Flip Video Cam, with Movie Maker, Vimeo, or any of your editing software will have an opportunity. It will give you an option to export your piece. You want to make sure that you name your project in a way that makes sense. I highly suggest including the date of the project in case you're doing a series over time and give it a meaningful name. You want to select a location to save it that you'll remember so you may have an archive for your digital media maybe that exists on a server. But you definitely don't want to name something like Project 1, Project 2 that gets lost. And choose a format and size. A lot of our interfaces already include different formats and sizes so you don't have to know pixel size. You can be like, oh, well I'm doing this for a DVD for my funders, or oh, I'm doing this for YouTube. So you should be able to choose from the interface. And then you'll export and save. Once you export it will take a couple of minutes. You should pat yourself on the back on a job well done. And then I highly recommend that you save a duplicate copy of that file onto another computer, onto another server, onto a flash drive. Computers always know when a deadline is coming and tech happens. Make sure that you have a backup. Different formats that you can export to include Windows media, video files, AVI's, .mov's, .m4v's, .mp4's, and .mp4's. So just to let you know, those are the file extensions that you will see on your video projects. Another one might be .dv. And if you're looking for other resources to help polish your piece and once you've got over your digital storytelling 101, Vimeo offers a really great video school online and it's free. Current TV also has a production knowledge base. So they take you through all of the steps between pre-production, post-production, production, and marketing. Melissa, we've already created our beautiful piece and we want to show it to the world. What's the next thing that we should do? So now that your piece is done, now that you've shown it to a few other steps of eyes to look over, you definitely want to promote it as much as possible. Social media is your best friend. I live on social media. That is the way that I've been able to build my brand as a cause correspondent. So what you want to do first is distribute. You can use YouTube or Vimeo. I like to use both. I think it's good to have your content and as many platforms as possible. If you're uploading to YouTube or Vimeo, both platforms accept the MP4 file and MOV. And once you've uploaded the video, you'll see a button there that says Uploads. It's going to take a few minutes. And especially if you're choosing to upload the video in HD quality, which I recommend it might take up to an hour, but just be patient and it will upload. After it's there, definitely make sure that your title is there with the keywords and you'll write a short summary underneath about what your project is about. From there, this is when it's important to optimize your search engine. Now what I mean by that is use keywords and tags. So what you're going to do is you're going to see an option that says Tags underneath the title. You'll list any pronouns. I'm sorry, any proper nouns. Your name, the name of the nonprofit or organization that you're representing in the piece. Names of people that you're interviewing, names of foundations, it's good to name drop. I highly recommend it. So any important name that you think would be popular when somebody's doing a Google search, optimize that, put it in your keywords or tags, and that will help spread the word. Once your video is there, you've optimized your search engine, start promoting it all over Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, MySpace if you still use it. You can send out, I still believe in sending out emails to your friends and family to help spread the word. And from there, use catchy headlines to promote it. Anything that short and sweet, concise, something that's really going to catch somebody's eyes. I want to offer, if you have a more analog institution, a lot of the public schools that I work with don't have internet access or spotty. So I always have a showing and a celebration at the end of the work. So you should gather a bunch of your friends, supporters, funders, volunteers, participants, and have a showing of this piece. You should get a response to your work. You should see how the audience connects with it, and really, really celebrate it. So if you've got a projector, speakers, get some snacks, it's really an amazing thing to be working on this video project or this digital story for hours by yourself in front of a computer editing it. But it's a whole other experience to experience it in a room with people and to see how they respond to your piece. Because once they start talking about it, then other people will talk about it, and that will go viral that way. Let's recapture the process, Melissa. Okay, so you've written your script, you've worked backwards, you've gotten your footage, your interviews, your still images, and now you get to go over to the voiceover side. You'll get your voiceover from your script. You edit, you turn the water into wine, sound effects, background music. This is really, in addition to, in addition to content given to you by your interview subjects, this to me is one of the most important parts of the process because this is what's going to drive the emotion. And for nonprofit to social benefit organizations, the most important thing is to move people, touch them in some way, to get them to support your cause and to get them to fund it, and to get them to rally and volunteer for you. So music, universal language of love, you know, air cobbling stress music, music, sound effect, that's really what's going to drive the emotion. Post-production video from your device into your computer, editing, uploading, then you export to an MP4 file or MOV. Those are the two files that Eric and I like to use the most for Vimeo and for YouTube. But there are other files formats that you can use as well. And from there showcase, celebrate, definitely showcase to applaud yourself and also to get some critiques. Once you see it on a larger screen and once you see the reaction to an audience, you might want to go back and change some things or make some additions, maybe even go out and get another interview to add to it and create an entire series based on your one video that you just made. And from there distributing, promoting, make this fun. Make this fun, make it a content. See how many people you can get to retweet your amazing video that you just made. See how many people just clicked on your video. You can track how many people have gone to your site by looking at the analytics in your site if you are doing it from WordPress. You can also do that with Tumblr. So have fun with this bar. Some people tend to stay because it's time consuming, but it really is, and we just have a powerful impact. Melissa, if you'll go ahead and forward the next slide for me because I'm getting the digital wheels back. But we wanted to show you some examples of what you can do. Thank you. So there are two examples. At the top is, would you explain the piece at the top, Melissa? So the top piece I mentioned earlier, this is a piece that is all about the meaning of activism. Fierce Light Films produce this. And what they did is just edited a series of sound bites back to back with different activists talking about what activism means to them. There's no voice over. It's just people talking for a few seconds about the definition of activism today. And sometimes that's all you need. Sometimes you just need people saying something, a series of powerful messages. And then the piece on the bottom was actually created by 7th graders that I worked with a few years ago. And they did a stop motion animation. So they used just simple images. And it's basically the story of a Good Samaritan. And there's no voice over at all. They just used a piece of music and they illustrated their story. So you can go from a lab rat using video camera or they used a whiteboard with a black marker and just created the spills and pulled them together. So you can play around with the format that makes sense to create your story. And if you want to know more, there's a couple of other resources that we can share with you. So there's the Abarth Digital Storytelling blog which basically is like a global archive of different digital story techniques that you can use. Really enjoy them. And then of course last week, if you still need to get started, you can go to the Get Storyed website and you can also go to the Center for Digital Storytelling website. I guess this is a good point for me to jump right back in again if that's okay. Okay, thank you both. That's really great information and there's been many, many great questions that have come through. I wanted to let everyone know that this is a short URL that will bring you to the archive page of the webinar that we did last week that will be sent via the chat and it will also be sent in the follow-up message that you'll get from me this afternoon. But this is an hour-long webinar that we did to kick off the Digital Storytelling event. And we had a couple of presenters, one from Get Storyed, Michael Margolis and Rob Kershaw from Center for Digital Storytelling. Definitely worth the watch. I'd encourage you to take time to watch that. And then move on to the slide with contact information for Erica and Melissa. Obviously both very seasoned videographers have done a lot of work and really know their stuff. So I've learned a lot myself in doing this preparation. So I hope you enjoy this information. So now we've got about 20 minutes, last four questions and answers. We've had quite a few questions submitted via the chat already. So I'm going to start asking some questions. We do have some resources that we'd like to share which I'll get to before we end the call. And remember you'll get a copy of this PowerPoint in the follow-up message that I send out later today. And all of the resources that we have listed in here are hyperlinked and take you directly to those websites. Since it's more interesting to look at their faces than this boring question slide, I'm going to move to that slide while I ask some questions. So one question that came through earlier that Alicia asked, how careful do you have to be about advertising unintentional people, etc. in the background of your digital media in your final project as far as copyright and permission? Well, when I worked in television we got release forms. Basically, just forms stating that if you're shooting somebody in the background that they're okay with it, or even for your interview subjects. I would think for your interview subjects because they've already verbally agreed to be a part of your piece. You don't necessarily need release agreements from them. But it's nice to have those. If you are going to go to a location where there are going to be people milling around in the background, it's good to have release forms on location with you. In terms of advertising, I've never run into that as an issue. Erica, have you ever had to kind of blur out somebody's logo on a t-shirt or anything like that? No, I haven't come across that just because the purposes of the pieces that are types of organizations are creating are for educational use. We're not creating digital stories to make money usually. To fundraise, yes. But we're not having theater releases and having red carpet. But it is a good idea to have those release forms. And I encourage people to create their own art as much as possible to just avoid those copyright issues in case you have a Coca-Cola t-shirt, in case you have Mickey Mouse in the background, just to be safe. But it's stuff that you're wearing. I haven't come across that as being an issue in digital story project. Great, thank you. A couple of questions relating to voice-overs. They just want to talk a little bit more about how to create good voice-overs. One question that Beth had specifically, with ambient sound, large areas, high ceilings, what kind of suggestions would you have for counteracting that situation? I have a really great and simple solution to that. I call it the blanket method of recording. And it may sound ridiculous, but if you put a sheet or a blanket over the recording source, the microphone, and the recording artist, that dampens out the noise. And I usually work in schools where it's hard to find a quiet place, and that actually dampens out the sound. If nothing else, if you have dividers, you can put that around where you're recording. And again, anything that blocks outer sound will help you in your recording process. Great, thank you. I remember you talking about that when we were setting up for this. I'm going to get her to talk about the blanket. A question having to do with the two-minute time limit, or what kinds of, I mean, is that a set thing? What's the guidance that you have about long videos, short videos? I recommend the shorter the better. If it's a more in-depth piece, you can go maybe two and a half minutes. I actually prefer a minute 30, but I really would recommend not going beyond two minutes unless it's a long format documentary or something of that nature. Erica, what do you think? Well, I encourage people who are doing this for the first time to choose a shorter piece just because you'll have greater success. You want to make those two minutes really deep and really wonderful and really rich. If you go on for five minutes, but it's like five pictures for five minutes, that won't be compelling for your audience. Remember, we're drawn to buy things with 10 and 15-second advertisements. So a minute and a half is actually a really long time for you to tell your story and to encourage your constituents to an action. And I know we mentioned B-Roll earlier, but could you talk a little bit more about it and how it can be used? Sure. B-Roll is your broadcast rule. That means that's your footage. So that typically is what you're going to lay down as the visuals in your piece while a voiceover is in place. You can also use part of a sound bite from an interview subject to be the audio over a picture, a moving image, which is your B-Roll. So the B-Roll is anything that you shoot in the field with your camera that includes locations. We talked a little bit about panning left and right from locations or on a person. The B-Roll is basically just the footage. So that's going to be the pretty pictures that everyone is looking at while you're talking or while your interview subject is talking. Thank you. And some questions about the video format. I know we had a whole slide with the different video formats listed, but is there one that you would recommend that's the most universal or user-friendly? I think we go back to the slide. Go ahead. I think at P4 and MOV. Yeah. MPEG is about as universal as JPEG. So if you're used to getting a picture, an MPEG is basically the moving picture format of a JPEG. So I would agree. And this one has to do with grant opportunities. We're all so excited about making a digital story, but what if we don't have that hardware software? I know there's some free software online, but some money is going to need to be invested. So what do you have? What kind of recommendations on trying to get grant funding to purchase this equipment? If you're an educator, I highly recommend DonorsChoose.org where you can have a wish list essentially and DonorsChoose to give you that equipment. I have a librarian friend that I worked with at Monarch Academy and she has created her own media arts lab from her DonorsChoose supporters. She's gotten cameras. She's gotten scanners. So don't ever underestimate the power of the web to give you these things. And also just speak to your friends and family. A lot of us are upgrading our equipment. So a lot of people might be like, oh, I don't use that digital camera anymore. Oh yeah, I haven't used that video camera in years. Feel free to talk to your constituency and use your wish list for your organization because you will find that you'll get a lot of equipment that way. Another thing just to throw out there that could be helpful in raising money to buy your own equipment would be Kickstarter. If any of you are familiar with Kickstarter, somebody just was able to finance a film using the Kickstarter platform and now they're going to Sundance with that film. So it's definitely a powerful platform. I'm going to move on to the next question so we can get through more questions. Lots of people are asking about music and I pulled up this slide that we had earlier, The Free Sound Project. What free music sites would we suggest? And what specific music? What is the best way to get permission to use music from a performer CD? Well, to get permission, as long as you're willing to talk to lawyers or have a personal connection with the artist, that's more difficult and more of a challenge. And I work with a lot of young people who want to use their favorite songs. So I often encourage them to find music that has the style that they want to use but not necessarily that specific song. But there are lots of resources that actually sent you Kami in that follow-up email just because I didn't want to have 20 slides of music resources. But there are plenty of free music resources out there so that will come in the follow-up. Which I'll pull up that slide right now. I separated the resources slides into a couple. So we've got the digital media outlets. I'm not going to keep this up very long. You'll all get a copy of this PowerPoint. We have another slide with training and lessons. And these of course link directly to those websites. And then we have this slide for ideas. So in there we have another one more slide of resources that's specific to the digital storytelling challenge which we'll hear about in just a few minutes from Megan. But I'm going to move on to another question. So many good questions. Suggestions? Can I take a second to talk about those projects that are using just still images? I just wanted to recommend. So if you're using just still images, I recommend about 8 images a minute. It gives variety to the audience. Those still images can be stills that you can take still from your video. You can also use titles as well, so like words on the screen. But 8 images a minute is a good variety for the audience. So I just wanted to make sure that I put that up. Very good. Chad had a question. Suggestions for backdrop or background? Plain looks institutional but others can look too busy. What are your thoughts? For video or for film? He didn't specify, so I guess it would be, I imagine the background for either, what should you take into consideration when setting up the shot? If someone's got plaid and then they're standing in front of a graffiti site, there could be a lot of visual stuff going on. So what should be taken into consideration when doing your shots? Melissa, what's your suggestion for video? For video, well one thing that I didn't talk about during the actual shooting part is when you're interviewing, when you're talking to an interview subject, you can, since the flip cam, the lens is very tiny, the iris of the lens is very tiny, the flip cam or Z18, you'll get used to it though. It's pretty intuitive. But if you can try to shoot so that there is some space between your subject and you in terms of, so if you're looking at the subject, you kind of want to have him on the right side, he or she on the right side, and then have some space to the left. If you're shooting him and he's in the left angle then you want to have some space on the right side just so that it's not a head-on, straight, focused shot. In terms of graffiti, things in the background, I mean whatever background really is pleasing to the eye and that adds to your story. If you're interviewing somebody at a playground, have some kids playing in the background, if they've signed release forms, have the jungle gym back there, have the slide, have the swings. People like watching people but you don't want it to be so distracting that it takes away from what the interview subject is saying. If you are shooting a source, and you just said if there's graffiti in the background, if the graffiti helps tell the story, have a graffiti in the background. If it's vulgar or if it's distracting then don't shoot it, go to a different location. But really anything that's pretty, I mean it's really just using your best judgment and determining what is visually simulating to you. I wish I could give something more technical and specific in terms of how you should shoot that. But if you think about pieces that you see broadcast on CNN or ABC or even commercials, the shots are set up to look pretty. I mean we're not all these great cinematographers but it really comes with practice. You'll start to see yourself develop and have a better eye over time I think. And this has also, I'm going to talk about lighting because I think then Erica if you could go into, lighting can go for both, kind of backlighting indoors and general fluorescent lighting and how that can colorize people in a funny way. So any recommendations? Fluorescent lights make people look green. Turn them off if you can. Natural light is great because it makes people look like people. But you may want to use like a darker light to set the tone, right? You could do a lot if a person looks shadowed versus if they're in a sunny environment. But if you can avoid fluorescent lights, turn them off. And Melissa, I don't know if you have suggestions for if you're not using ambient light if you have any quick tools for just enhancing lighting. Oh, and how to light from the front as opposed to the back and back kind of thing. Not really. I don't use any lighting kits but there are lighting kits available that aren't expensive. We can probably go online and look for some of those resources and have those made available for you guys. But I mean if you're lighting, I would try to avoid white lit backgrounds. They're just not that attractive. And definitely avoid fluorescent light. No shadows. You want to avoid shadows at all cost. So if you are talking to somebody and the sun is in the background, you're probably not going to see their face that well. So you're going to want to change the angle of the shot so that the sun is not shining on their back like that. Does that answer your question, Erica? And I know some other folks have just gotten their inexpensive lights from a hardware store that clamp on to things. And those can work in a pinch. So I would use incandescent, not fluorescent. Incandescent just has the spectrum of natural light that our eye catches and that helps the camera catch that color too. And what she was talking about for video also works for still. You want to light any photographic subjects in a similar way. I guess the benefit of still is you could go into Photoshop, lighten it up if you needed to. I know you can do some of the similar things with augmenting the video images. I'm not sure how much room you have to do those kinds of edits, but we are out of time. So we don't have any time for more questions. Oh no, it went by so fast. But I wanted to invite Megan Keen to tell us a little bit about the Digital Story Telling Challenge. So Megan, hello everybody. Great, thanks. Hi everyone. This is Megan Keen here. I'm here with TechSoup and I'm part of our Digital Story Telling Team. I just wanted to tell you a little bit more about our challenge which is on. We are really excited about it and we are hoping to see some of the submissions that come in this year. So to be a little clear about the challenges, the challenges you can either submit a 60-second or less video that you upload to YouTube or you can upload a 5-panel image story on Flickr. So what we ask you to do in your story is to just tell us a little bit more about what is the story of your organization? Why are you passionate about the cause? Last year was really fantastic because I got to see a lot of the submissions coming in and it was really inspiring just to kind of see all of the organizations that we have out there in the community and some of the work we are doing. One of the great things this year is we have so many prizes. We have really expanded the number of prizes that are available to the winners and we have some great stuff including a flip video camera and a projector and some other prizes from Adobe and Citrix. So you can go ahead and check out the prizes link that will be in the presentation that goes around so you can check those out. So you've got a couple more weeks. The deadline to submit your story is January 31st. You can also see more details on the challenge page. And on the challenge page there are step-by-step directions on how you actually go about submitting and the really important one which is the submission form that also has the directions but also just has a little place where you can enter your information and the URL of your story. So we make sure that we have it and we have you counted in the challenge. And that is actually about it for me on the challenge. If you have any questions, please do feel free to ask them in the TechSoup forums. We actually have a whole bunch that are going on right now and that link will also be in the presentation for you. Great. Thanks Megan. And here is an outline of some of the deadlines. Again, the deadline for submissions is January 31st. So that is all the time that we have. I'd like to thank you all for participating today. It was a really great presentation. So much information in 60 minutes. I'm quite amazed at all the information that we got to hear from Erica and Melissa. So thank you both to our wonderful presenters and for the team of TechSoupers on the back end doing all the chatting and the organizing of questions and answering questions on the chat. So I'm really happy to be presenting this information to you guys. Have a great day. Good luck. Please submit your stories. And have a great day. Thanks everyone. Call your story. Thank you. Bye-bye.