Storytelling in the 21st century

by Denise Glass
Tayside Reporter, BBC Scotland news website

Sitting around the digi campfire with different coloured flames

How do you keep traditional storytelling alive in a world obsessed with new technology? And how must it adapt and change?

Those are the questions that third years students at Dundee University have been trying to answer.

They were given the task of telling the traditional story of Willie the Piper using digital media.

Willie is a drove piper who is wandering the hills on a cold wet hogmanay when he runs into an adventure which involves a dead body, an elderly couple and a cow.

Magic

First up is 22-year-old Alan Gray who has created the digital campfire.

"I've replaced the flame with light," he said.

"And I've allowed the storyteller to control the colour of the light and the mood of the story with gestures of his hands."

"A wave to the left gives you yellow, signifying a happy, daytime mood," Alan said.

He said: "To the top right you get blues and purples for a night-time or scary scene. Then there's red for anger or blood."

Alan admits that his invention may not live up to a real campfire but thinks it would be helpful for getting children to tell and enjoy stories.

He said: "I don't think it can compete with traditional proper campfires because there's a magic to that.

"But I hope I can enhance the experience of indoor use."

The puppets are controlled by a computer and audience members

Also involved, is Ceara McCurdy, 20, who has created iTales, where people can put traditional stories on their iPods.

Ceara said: "It's all about classic, historical stories that we would have passed down through generations, which are a part of our culture and are important for us to understand where we've come from.

"I wanted to look at bringing storytelling to the younger generation - between mid teens and late 20s.

"I looked at what it was common for people to have, and the iPod, that's their key audience."

Or how do you fancy a puppet show controlled not by a puppeteer but by a computer?

Graham Hancock, 20, said: "You can change the perspective at any point during a story and it switches to that character's perspective, so it then tells their sequence of events and how they experience the story themselves.

"It's just taking away the actual puppeteer and it's making it more of an audience interaction.

"A traditional puppet show is more the audience just sits and watches, but I wanted the audience to have a good part to play in this."

The audience member can change which character is telling the story by putting their hand over the talking puppet's mouth to silence them.

Emotional stories

Sarah McMichael, 21, wanted to make sure the audience felt the full emotion of the story and mixed psychology with computing for her project.

She used spirals on the computer screen to represent different people in the story - different colours and positions would indicate how the character was feeling.

She said: "If people watched the animation they managed to pick up on the different emotions, whereas if they just listened to the audio they didn't pick up the different emotions and just quoted from the text."

The students now have to wait to find out if their examiners were convinced by their vision of future storytelling.