When I’ve written a post with a list of mobile storytelling applications, I had a chance to take a closer look at Blurb Mobile. When I opened it for the first time a couple of days earlier, it looked a bit complicated, but when you give it a second chance, it’ll reveal all the possibilities and open your imagination as to how future digital storytelling will look like.
The most prominent part of Blurb is that it prompts you to think of a story as a sequence. You can upload up to eight elements at once and this is immediately making you think of the order, the structure, the plot.
Now, a fantastic thing is that those eight frames to fill don’t have to be of the same kind. You can add not only images, but also audio and video. You can place them in one story. This is revolutionary.
So far we had single-form stories. We read books, watched films and listened to radio. We also have multimedia stories, like enhanced e-books. In all of them, a prevailing form is known upfront.
Blurb is different and I realized that only because of looking at such a simple task – eight frames waiting to be filled with the story. Those frames are equal and sequenced.
A piece of music after a picture of a beautiful girl is a different piece of story than a picture of a beautiful girl and a picture of a piano.
When you sit down with iMovie, you are going to make a video. When you take Blurb Mobile, the imagination works differently. There is absolutely no need to think of eight images or eight videos or eight audio tracks. Once you drop the usual thinking, you allow yourself a to bring a completely new, fresh, unexpected dynamics to a story.
