‘To This Day’ Video has Gone Viral

Wow. Have a look at this

Many many animators donated their time and worked in collaboration with the volunteer efforts of Vancouver design group Giant Ant over a mere 20 days to create an impressive variety of multiple animation segments which were strung together to produce the incredibly successful and poignant To This Day video. The animation went viral and is now approaching 5 million views in barely a week. … Read More »

How We Build Stories at Moving Tales

Conventional spoken storytelling is collaborative in that the tales are handed along and developed over time. Every telling is unique and requires a listening audience to become meaningful. We believe that digital stories are no exception: they too develop over time, and are created through the collaborative efforts and disparate skills of many individuals, each of whom brings his or her own perspective and creative signature to the projects. 

At Moving Tales, all aspects of production, from the written narrative, to the creation of images and ambient sound form part of a collaborative call and response process as the stories are developed.  The written narrative is seldom fixed from the start, but rather expands and contracts in the call and response process as the images and sounds are developed around it and woven through it over time. This method is unique as opposed to writing in isolation.  … Read More »

The Technology of Sticks and Pigment

You could say the relationship between storytelling and technology goes back a long time – that the first stories were told in caves and in the sand, and the first ‘technologies’ were the sticks and the pigments used to draw them.

There is clearly a shift taking place towards a multi media approach to exploring, developing, sharing and preserving stories, both age old and modern tales. These intersections present all sorts of possibilities which challenge us to question the nature of what constitutes narrative storytelling in its many manifestations as it evolves in the digital age. … Read More »

VANCOUVER – (March 26, 2012) – Innovative iOS content creators Moving Tales’ have released free learning resources based on their world-wide bestselling ‘Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross’ tale. Moving Tales has implemented a “Sharing” section in their recent web site relaunch, whereby the text, images and an innovative lesson plan based on ‘Pedlar Lady’ are released under Creative Commons License. This CC license agreement allows teachers, librarians, parents and creatives from any discipline to legally download, copy, manipulate and ‘share-alike’ the material without fear of copyright infringement.

“Its a lovely idea to ‘return’ the Pedlar Lady story into ‘the commons’.” says Moving Tales’ founder Matthew Talbot-Kelly. “The seeds of the Pedlar Lady tale are found in the oral storytelling traditions and are part of our common cultural legacy. In this digital age, the Creative Commons License makes sense. We are saying, … Read More »

On the sidebar:

Struggling with life’s moving speed?
Moving Tales has what you need.
A tale or two to bring you back,
To the present moment – where life’s at. … Read More »

We hope you will explore with us a fun and slightly paradoxical new experimental project – what we are calling “The Slow Twitter Project”.

We love words, traditional & slow culture. We like to play. We asked ourselves how should we engage with Twitter which, given its impulse-driven fast moving nature, seemingly stands in contrast to much of what we aspire to. We started to think about how we might subvert this instantaneity. We wanted to reconsider Twitter as a playful and poetic medium in its own right. We also decided to try and play out the concept of slowness into the Twittersphere. Maybe we can reclaim a fragment of the impulse-driven site as a place for slowly revealed well thought-out and playful one-liners, two-liners and four-liners.

Further, as we just came through a municipal election where there were a few “Burma-Shave” style signs deployed, we started to think that one way to look at the postings to the Twitterverse might be to frame them as being analogous to the handmade Burma-Shave billboards by the sides of the road throughout rural American in the middle of the last century. Putting these intentions together, we came up with “Slow Tweeting” – where witty rhymes are revealed incrementally and slowly through the immediacy of Twitter.

The Rules

This is an experiment, so its form and specifics may change. Here are the “rules” to Moving Tales ‘Burma Shave’ inspired Slow Tweeting so far – reveal the rhymes, one line (“billboard”) at a time, in reverse order, over a set increment of time.

Moving Tales’ wordsmith Jacqueline O Rogers, has written a few Slow Tweets for us that praise the virtues of going slow. We will be sharing them over the next weeks with you. Look in the sidebar to the right to see them come together.

Follow us!

We will post our Slow Tweets from @tweet_slow.

As lovers and advocates of well considered words, traditional culture, and playful slow media, we asked ourselves how should we engage with Twitter which, on the face of it, given its impulse-driven fast moving nature, seemingly stands in contrast to much of what we aspire to. At the same time as these ruminations, we rediscovered this wise twitter guide initially published in an edition of Tricycle last year by @TinyBuddha.

Give it a read, it is a gem.