Category Archives: Digital tools and tips

For video storytelling, you take shots and put them together in sequences. A video sequence is a series of shots on the same subject that are edited together to tell a story. A well-edited video sequence adds visual variety to video storytelling. Continue reading →

Journalists and digital storytellers can take advantage of the video tour feature of Google Earth Pro, which used to cost $399 a year but is now available for free, for an immersive audience experience with locations and places.

A Google map with embedded photos and videos becomes a “multimedia map” that provides for an interactive presentation tool for use in tourism, event planning, news reporting and other location-based presentations.

By cropping a photo to its most salient part, we can use Google’s “search by image” feature to identify object in a photo that does not have accompanying texts, caption or metadata.

Google Maps and Street View provide easy ways to illustrate “where it is” and “what it looks like” – two  questions a reader may raise but are usually left unanswered.

A participant in my online course Google Mapping for Communicators created a virtual tour using Google Earth, and it provides for a good example of how Google Earth can be used as a storytelling tool.

Google recently released a camera app, Google Camera, to mobile devices running Android 4.4 KitKat. Photo Sphere, one unique feature of Google Camera, makes it easy to create a custom Street View of a news scene and embed it in … Continue reading →

I tested three free map tools to create custom maps that show multiple dimensions of a story: where (location), when (time), what (photos, videos, articles). The three tools are Meograph, StoryMap JS and Google Maps Engine Lite; the test and … Continue reading →