There are many different methods to visual storytelling, depending on the meaning you want to convey, the resources you have available and the emotions you want to evoke. There are many different ways to tell a story and different methods you can use. Stories can be highly narrativized, similar to a Disney movie where characters, morals and messages are clearly defined. Inversely, they can have low narrative appeal. Similar to an abstract painting, there is no clearly defined intent, message or character. Audiences become participants and imbue the story with their own understandings.

The easiest way to create a digital story is to simply take and share some visual imagery with an associated text or commentary. For example, this photostory, created for a simple exercise by Nieves Gomez, one of the participants in our first course, tells a clear story about growing and sharing your harvest with the sheep.

To create a more sophisticated story, you can weave the imagery together into captivating, entertaining adventures. These could include villains, victims and heroes. Such characters need not be people; they can be plants, animals and even supposedly inanimate objects.