Digital Literacy Narrative Evaluations

Scannell's narrative about her writing roots mimicked a documentary style: cycling through interviews, original videos, and panning across images that relate to the narration. It got a bit long and over-detailed, to the point that I began wondering when it would end.

Eww. Didn't like Andfull's video. She stumbled through her narration which could have used some spicing up (I stopped counting the number of times she said she "luuuhved ____ book" after 6), and the images she chose were low quality. Even though her sequence and concept were pretty good, these features distracted me enough to reject her video; to me, it just conveyed a lack of editing or refining, which is important when telling a story (making sure the medium doesn't distract from the message).

The author of this video chose a unique style to tell a story, giving "Words, Magic" by Truaman a much different feel than the others; the transparency of its recording and prompt, as well as the impression that the interview is completely impromptu, generate a sense of genuineness. The sounds of hubbub in the background also add to this effect.

Peyton's narrative used fun music that established a fun pace with his videos and text, and he used a variety of views to convey his story. The blurriness in his cell phone shots definitely took away from the overall quality of the video, but it was cute, concise, and exaggerated enough to keep a smirk on my face through the whole clip.

Though Eric Wooten used the smallest variety of media, he had the most effective narrative (IMO). His captions were short, witty, and displayed with enough time on each picture to absorb both the words and the image.  The narrative had a clear intro, climax, and resolution, and his pictures were comical and endearing. However, I wish he would have done something more creative with his captions.

So what should we look at when evaluating literacy narratives?
I believe these things are pretty important:

• Quality of the story -- diction, plot, narration/text, readability
• Use of video/pictures -- image quality, composition, how it fits with the rest of the video
• Text -- are we given enough time to process the words as well as the images they accompany? Color, placement
• Music, special effects (ie: transitions) -- do they distract from the message?
• Editing!