Digital Storytelling with Photostory 3

During my presentation on digital storytelling at the New York Tech Forum with Joe Brennan, we showed Microsoft Photostory 3, which is a free alternative to MovieMaker2 (and a better one in my opinion) and can be used to create digital storytelling movies fairly easily but with surprising sophisticated effects. We created a very simple story in about 10 minutes (I had the script and the images, so I cheated) and the audience members had many questions and immediately saw the potential of the software as a tool to take some initial first steps in digital storytelling without a great financial investment. The software only takes about 1/2 hour for adults to learn (!) and probably could easily be used by third graders and above.

The software comes complete with the capabilities to do pans and zooms, add transitions, add text, narrate voice, as well as adding music from either a personal mp3 library or from music that is contained on-board within the software. There are numerous rendering options with a great deal of flexibility given the final destination of the completed movie. Take Photostory 3, add images from Flickr, music from Freeplaymusic, and get a classroom set of noise-reduction microphone headsets and you have a very cool digital storytelling capability for about 500 bucks.

With that in mind, I have created a Photostory 3 tutorial that explains each screen of the interface.

You can also download the software here. Photostory 3 requires Windows MediaPlayer 10.