Stories are everywhere. They share emotional moments, communicate solutions to problems, and even sell products and services. In fact, you probably see more than one story every single day, even if you don’t read many books.
One reason there are so many stories is that people connect to them on a human level. Well-told stories create empathy and interest in their readers. Tell a good story and you can captivate almost anyone about almost any topic.
It probably helps that the act of storytelling has been part of human history since ancient times. Before writing was a primary form of communication, oral storytelling was the way history was passed down. As writing became more accessible and consumable, stories began to circulate in print. Novels were extremely expensive in their early years, so the longer narratives were printed in serial form in newspapers. Famous authors such as George Eliot wrote serial novels one section at a time
Technology has come a long way since then, and there are many ways to tell moving stories through digital technologies.
What is a Digital Story?
To recognize why digital storytelling is important, it’s key to understand what a digital story actually is.
At the most basic level, digital storytelling is a “presentation combining a variety of digital elements within a narrative structure (a story).” Types of media could include:
- Text
- Graphics
- Social media elements (for instance, a Tweet)
- Audio
- Video
- Interactive elements (like a digital map)
Essentially, a digital story is one that uses multiple forms of media to tell a narrative.
Other sources specify further that digital storytelling is often used to tell everyday people’s stories. As technology advances, it’s become easier for a more diverse population of people to share their stories with the world. This is partially why digital storytelling has become a common practice in educational settings.
Digital stories are also used in marketing to make a personal connection with potential customers, making it easier to effectively market products and services to them.
7 Elements to Include in Effective Digital Stories & How to Create Them
According to the University of Houston and the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS), there are seven elements in every digital story: point of view, a dramatic question, emotional content, your voice, a soundtrack, economy, and pacing.
For each of the elements, you can use different types of technology to create the desired effect. Although each creative has its own process, and its own set of favorite tools, the Adobe Creative Cloud is widely used and enjoyed by digital storytellers. There are numerous industry-leading and industry-standard softwares among the collection of programs.
Probably the most important Adobe programs to learn when creating digital stories are Photoshop (photo editing), Illustrator (artwork & illustration), InDesign (text & graphic design), Premiere Pro (video editing), Adobe Audition (audio production), and After Effects (motion graphics & special effects).
Point of View
Point of view is the perspective from which a story is told. For instance, a first-person narrative is told using “I” and often describes personal experiences. Third-person narratives use “she/he/them” and reflect a person watching events happen around them.
Most times, digital stories are non-fiction, meaning they aren’t made up. They reflect real-life situations with real people regardless of whether they’re told from a first or third-person point of view. So when a Graphic Designer goes to create the perspective for a digital story, it’s important to include as many accurate details as possible.
Although digital stories are usually based on real people and real situations, there’s often a need to animate the story or create illustrations to represent it throughout a short video, for example. Adobe Illustrator is an excellent tool for beginning to create a strong perspective because of the character-building tools. It also has more than 90 illustration tools, which means the graphic design professional can customize any element of a story’s artwork.
Adobe Photoshop is also a strong contender for creating a unique perspective. Because of the almost unlimited customization abilities and the way expert Graphic Designers can manipulate any element of an image, it’s a great tool for designing original artwork. The Designer could even start with a real-life image and adapt it to fit the needs of the digital story.
A Dramatic Question
A dramatic question has a simple purpose: to keep the audience engrossed in the story. Questions such as: Will the protagonist defeat their enemy? Will the girl fall in love with the love interest (and will they love her back)? Will a young man ever escape the island and return home to his family?
These big questions run throughout the entire narrative, with each event leading up to the conclusion. The question is always answered by the end of the story, which means the audience can have closure and the story will linger in their minds just a little longer.
It might be tempting to assume that a dramatic question isn’t in all digital stories; after all, how can a 30-second commercial have such a large, meaningful thought behind it? Surely it can’t have the same impact as a feature-length film, right? The truth is that all digital stories have one of these driving questions behind them- they simply play out differently depending on the goal of the story.
One way that’s exceptionally helpful for shorter digital stories to engage with a dramatic question is for it to have engaging images that intrigue the viewer. The old adage rings true: a picture really is worth a thousand words. Whether a Graphic Designer creates new, multi-layer artwork for a digital story to reflect a complicated idea in a visual way, or whether they modify existing images with editing, Photoshop can be a critical tool for the dramatic question.
On the other hand, Premiere Pro allows professionals to create stunning video content. Videos can use multiple mediums like images, sound, and animation, to help build suspense and lead the viewer through the story, likely without them even realizing it (if the story is well-told, that is). It all comes back to this one dramatic question.
Emotional Content
Everyone has seen a story that’s made them cry, whether because it’s heart-wrenching or heartwarming. The key to emotional content is creating moments the audience can relate to personally—there’s nothing more powerful for storytelling than empathy.
To create this powerful bond with an audience, there must be obstacles throughout the story, sometimes serious ones. These obstacles can be completely relatable for most people, such as a terrifying moment of suspense where a life hangs on by a thread. Does the character live or die? They can also be directed at a more specific group, such as the last time a teacher walks out of her classroom to retire after a long and fulfilling career helping children learn to read.
No matter what obstacles the characters in a story face, to create emotional content, there likely needs to be moving images. Illustrator, with its character design and illustration tools, is excellent for creating a more illustrative type of scenario. For instance, if the Graphic Designer wanted to use an illustration of a teacher instead of a real-life photo. Illustrator also has unique artboards feature that allows users to have up to 1,000 separate artboards on a single file, so if the Designer wanted to try out different emotions on the same set of characters, they could do so without creating multiple files.
If a design professional wants to use more realistic photos, Photoshop is an ideal tool. With the ability to manipulate any part of an image, down to the pixel, it would be a simple task to highlight a particularly moving part of an image—for instance, the look on someone’s face or a distinct part of the background.
For digital stories told through video, Adobe After Effects is an excellent way to create emotional sounds and effects. After Effects leads the industry for motion graphics and special effects, so if a digital storyteller wanted to add a sad trombone or a hopeful set of sounds right before the end of the emotional moment, this program is ideal.
Your Voice
Each story, no matter who’s doing the telling, has a unique voice. It’s the way the story is told. The words, the way the sentences are structured, and the way the story feels as you consume it. This narrative voice, whether in text or in video (or both, depending on the story), helps a viewer understand the details they need to know to get the full effect of a story.
In digital stories, which are mostly non-fiction, the voice often represents the person who’s been through the events. Sometimes, like in the case of short documentaries or collaborative projects, the voice is a combination of experiences. It might also be that a voice actor represents the person whose story is being told.
For digital storytellers who work closely with print mediums and words, Adobe InDesign is a powerful tool to show a strong narrative voice. InDesign works primarily with text-heavy documents and combines them with graphics in a visually pleasing way. The way the story looks on a page, for instance how the words are placed with the images, can give subtle clues and create a voice that the audience may not even be aware of, helping them connect to the story.
For professionals who work more with video and motion graphics, Adobe Audition is a great asset for creating an actual voice for the video. The program allows users to record, edit, mix, and repair audio tracks, which is ideal if the goal is to have a real human narrating the story.
Audition also works well with Premiere Pro, which is used for video editing. Within Premiere Pro, creatives can add a voice track to a timeline so it’s in sync with images and other graphics. The program also allows direct recording, which means that users can record their voice and edit it however they want or need potentially without having to use several other programs.
A Soundtrack
All great films have a solid soundtrack. The background music and special effects help guild the story and offer subtle clues about what’s going to happen. It can provide foreshadowing, and interact closely with how the audience will feel while watching a specific scene. For example, when a hero faces their biggest obstacle there is often loud, foreboding music and sounds. Will they triumph or will they fail? As the scene begins to end, the music changes to reflect the outcome.
Shorter digital stories function similarly, although on a smaller scale. Sound plays an important role in these shorter stories because it can provide some of that emotional content and connection to the audience more quickly than a two-hour film.
Adobe Audition is an excellent tool for creating a stellar soundtrack, particularly because of the Essential Sound panel. Through four primary editing types, digital storytellers can adjust the sound quality, add a soundtrack behind dialogue, add sound effects, and even alter the ambient noise.
Economy
The term economical has several meanings, most having to do with making good use of the time or money or effort spent on something. To be economically sound, something has to create enough “bang for your buck” so to speak.
Storytelling follows the same principle. Digital storytellers must include enough details to captivate and tell the story, but not too much which is likely to overwhelm the audience. It’s one thing to read a book and know you can skip ahead a bit if there are too many details. It’s another thing entirely to have too much information in a digital story because there’s not an efficient way to “skim” it. So storytellers work to be economical: to create the best story from the least amount of information possible.
If this sounds tricky, that’s because it is. Digital storytelling is an art that balances the story with the technology and how the end product looks and feels. One way to create a nice balance of economy in a digital story is through Adobe InDesign. Everything about a written story and the accompanying graphics can be manipulated and previewed on a page so as to be clear and precise, but not feel overpowering.
For video storytellers, Premiere Pro offers a nice suite of tools to create economical digital stories. The timeline feature is particularly useful in this case, because all of the other elements like graphics, text, and animation, can be set precisely within the timeline to ensure nothing is going over the allotted amount of time. The ability to see the elements in time also creates a visual to see where particular pieces might need to be added or eliminated based on how they fit in the video story.
Pacing
Each story progresses in its own time, whether it’s a fast pace like an action movie or the slow pace of a budding romance. The content of the story should determine its pace and the rhythm of how the story is told.
Although it may not seem like a big deal, how quickly or slowly a story plays out is intricately connected to the way the audience will experience it. Each audience expects different pacing based on why they’re seeing the digital story and what the goal is. Someone narrating their story after a lifetime of obstacles is likely to be much more emotional and paced differently than a vacuum commercial. Finding the balance and creating a good rhythm is essential to digital storytelling.
Perhaps unexpectedly, InDesign is a great tool for creating pace in a more text-heavy digital story because Graphic Designers can keep a very measured amount of content on each page to create a balance of text and images. The on-page design of a digital story can feel less overwhelming and easier to follow if the elements are balanced nicely with smaller portions at a time.
On the other hand, Premiere Pro is, again, a great tool for creating digital story pacing because of the ability to edit virtually any part of a video. In particular, the scene edit detect feature is helpful because it finds all of the cuts in a particular sequence so the creative professional doesn’t have to look for them, saving time, and making it simpler to create great pacing for a story.
How to Learn Digital Storytelling Software Skills
If you’re ready to become an expert digital storyteller, there are many ways to begin learning.
For an in-depth look at graphic design programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, Noble Desktop offers bootcamps that cover the fundamentals of each program, as well as an opportunity to create portfolio projects. To see available graphic design bootcamps, both live online or in-person, use the Noble Desktop Classes Near Me tool. It offers an easy way to compare reputable learning programs in the graphic design industry.
Noble also offers several certifications that could be helpful on your way to a new career in digital storytelling. The Graphic Design Certificate covers Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, and has a portfolio building course at the end. The Digital Design Certificate offers intensive learning for the same three design programs, as well as a curriculum about Adobe XD and a visual portfolio-building course.
If you’re more interested in video or film, the Motion Graphics Certificate may be the best way to learn about video production with programs such as Premiere Pro and After Effects.
There’s also a part-time Graphic Design Program for remote learners. Over the course of six months, the program will meet two days per week and cover graphic design topics in-depth. Program topics include Graphic Design Concepts, UX Design Thinking, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and XD.
If you don’t want to commute to a classroom, don’t worry. The courses are offered in-person or live online so you can learn however and wherever is most convenient for you.