Digital Storytelling

In this module, students will develop an advanced understanding of the art of storytelling as it is crafted using the affordances of digital multimedia. Every week, students will be introduced to various case studies of creative digital storytelling and examine how different narrative vectors and varied potentials of meaning are designed and engineered using tools, platforms, and contexts as diverse as: web environments (podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram), digital art and gaming (walking simulators, adventure games, Bitsy / Twine and related), electronic literature, mobile media, virtual / augmented / mixed reality.

A key goal of the module is to give students critical inspiration for the development of their own digital stories, in a creative, experimental vein. They will be introduced to a selection of techniques, and simple, freely available (and often open source) tools for crafting interactive, multimedia stories. They will be given the necessary support and training to deploy these tools in developing a portfolio of small-scale pieces and prototypes, enabling them to apply their developing background knowledge as a component of practice.