Nonprofits Live: Collaborative Storytelling Recap

The TechSoup Digital Storytelling Campaign kicked off with a special edition of Nonprofits Live on the topic of collaborative storytelling. Collaborative storytelling refers to working with a team, sometimes distributed, to produce video.

Featured on this edition of NPLive were:

• Aaron Bramly, Co-founder and Director of Communication/Education for Lights. Camera. Help
• Windy Borman, filmmaker at DVA Productions
• Thomas Grasty, Co-founder of Stroome
• David Evan Harris, Founder and Executive Director of the Global Lives Project

Starting a Collaborative Project

Bramley spoke to getting a project off the ground, which can be difficult because of the many pieces that go into creating a video. Bramley suggests that a video project's stakeholders develop a video production grid to get everyone on the same page. A production grid outlines:

• What will happen in a video from moment to moment
• What will be required to create those shots
• Where those pieces will come from

Some production teams will use storyboarding, but a production grid is helpful for teams that don't have illustrative or design skills. A production grid is easy to produce in a collaborative tool like Google Docs and is easily shared via email or file sharing.

Building a Team

Borman's experience has taught her that team building is important to collaborative storytelling. If you need to look outside of your organization for collaborators, look to your network. If you cannot identify anyone in your network who can help you with video production, ask someone in the network to introduce you.

When you recruit collaborators that you've never worked with for a project, look for people who have positive working relationships with other professionals. One valuable trait your collaborators should have is good communications skills. Video production requires that collaborators communicate what is wanted and needed and that they be realistic about those wants. Clear communication not only makes the task easier, it can also reduce production costs and time.

Working with Remote Collaborators

Grasty, who has a background in video production, often experienced the difficulty of collaborating with a remote production team. Grasty decided to help other video creators with Stroome, a collaborative video editing site. The site allows users to upload content — video, audio, and images — and invite others to put the pieces together. Users invite others to collaborate by creating a group; the group creator is designated the administrator. The site has social media integration to better facilitate sharing and collaboration.

The Story of the Global Lives Project

Harris rounded out the conversation on collaborative storytelling by sharing the story of the Global Lives Project. The Global Lives Project captured a day in the life of people from 10 countries. Harris was capable of traveling to only three of those countries and required collaborators for filming in the others. Working with his distributed production team required Skype, cloud storage, and email. The global production team included filmmakers, photographers, artists, architects, and designers, some of whom were volunteers.

Harris advises having patience with collaborators, especially volunteers, who all want to help and require good leadership and direction. Working well with collaborators requires playing to their strengths, as Harris did by asking multilingual volunteers to provide subtitles using the tool GotSub.

More Info

The hour ended with audience questions and links to digital storytelling tools, which can be found in the full recording. See more digital storytelling learning opportunities at the official TSDigs page.