5 of the Best Digital Storytelling Applications

In our experience, one of the best ways to reach our reluctant readers is with digital storytelling applications. Sure, digital storytelling still involves writing, but what makes it more engaging—and often less intimidating—than traditional writing is that it uses technology like audio, video and digital imagery. We’ve talked about Storybird and digital comic book generators before, but we want to share a few more of our favorite digital storytelling applications with you.

5 of the Best Digital Storytelling Applications

Peanut Gallery is a free web application that allows users to add inter-titles to silent films like Phantom of the Opera, Voyage to the Moon, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome and seven other films. What’s unique about this application is that the inter-titles are created by speaking into a computer microphone. Now for the bad news: Peanut Gallery can only be run in Google Chrome because it requires the Web Speech API to turn your audio into text.

Bombay TV is one of the quirkiest digital storytelling sites we’ve come across. Select clips from old Bollywood movies and write or record your own subtitles. Once you’re done, enter an email address and send it off.

Pic Lits. We’ve written about Flash Fiction before, but if you need a refresher, it’s basically prose of extreme brevity. Writers like H.P. Lovecraft, O. Henry and Kurt Vonnegut were fans of it, but we became acquainted with it after reading Earnest Hemingway’s six-word story.

Pic Lits is the perfect place to put the Flash Fiction into practice. Here you’ll find a gallery of photos and a collection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs and universals that you can drag and drop onto the photo. If you prefer not to limit your word choices, you can always freestyle and add your own. When you are done, you can either save, share, or email your work.

Using Comic Master’s sleek and intuitive interface, users can design their own graphic novel. Browse characters, add backgrounds, props, dialogue, captions, special effects and simply drag and drop. When you’re happy with your graphic novel either save it to your hard drive or email it.

Digital Films gives users the ability to choose and customize background scenes, characters, animated actions, dialog as well as intro and ending credits to their digital movie. Registered users will be able to access more advanced features and save/edit the movies that they create.