Digital storytelling is one of the things I’m most excited about in the charity digital space at the moment. The available tools just get better and better, and developments in HTML5 mean that rich digital stories can now be accessible and quick to download – no need for clunky plugins or enormous files.
I’ll feature one digital storytelling tool here each month, and one striking digital story.
Tool: Adobe Voice
Adobe Voice is a free app for the iPad which has to be one of the quickest and easiest pieces of software I’ve ever used.
It is effectively a slideshow creator (you can’t import video footage to it), but it animates those slideshows to turn them into videos, and if you’re clever with your story and imagery, these videos can be really effective.
With Voice, you can:
- Import your own images
- Add icons and images that Voice provides through Creative Commons
- Add royalty free music provided as part of the app
- Import your own music
- Record your own spoken soundtrack
The caveats:
- It is only available for iPads and nothing else.
- You can’t export video as standalone files – all your Voice videos are hosted on the Adobe Voice server and are in Adobe’s own Creative Cloud format. But you can use screen capture software to record your videos if necessary.
- You can’t customise fonts and colours, but there is a good variety of themes and you can import images with your branding.
Story: Great Strides 2014
Adobe don’t seem to maintain an online gallery of the best work being done with Voice, but this short video for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in the US is a good example of what can be done with Voice.