Vancouver – (March 20, 2013) Innovative digital story creators Moving Tales are releasing a new experiment in online story sharing April 3rd, 2013. Renowned for expanding storytelling in the digital era, Moving Tales is re-issuing its first Ebook children’s title, “Elly’s Lost and Found Sounds”, as a free Web App. Expanding on their best selling and critically acclaimed iOS apps and iBooks, like the bestselling “The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross” in which the company re-imagined an age old fable for the iPad and iPhone through filmic animation and multiple languages, “Elly’s Lost and Found Sounds” Web App allows Moving Tales’ to continue exploring what a digital story can be and how interactive ideas can be spread and sustained online.

“We’re bringing Elly to life on-line as an experiment in distribution and audience engagement.” said Matthew Talbot-Kelly, Moving Tales founder and creative … Read More »

We can easily misconstrue that technology is synonymous with machinery or automation. Of course, technology is not just machinery. One might say more accurately, that technology is the application of knowledge to solve a problem or improve a pre-existing condition.  In this sense, wheels, forks and books are not just technologies, but each are fantastic technologies. … Read More »

I recently heard an interview with writer Colum McCann (clip below).  He wrote a book called Let the Great World Spin.  In the interview he said “one of the great privileges about being a writer is that you become alive in a body that is not your own.” … 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 »

Exploring Narrative Through Technology

At Moving Tales we are continually exploring innovative ways to create dynamic content for our interactive digital publications. Part of this endeavour is to keep pace with evolving technologies. It is no coincidence that most of what we do and dream of doing seems to circle around our deep rooted love of stories. After all, we find it impossible to imagine a world without them. … Read More »

VANCOUVER – (April 30, 2012) – Innovative iOS content creators Moving Tales’ release three Ebooks available through Apple’s iBookstore, “The Classic World Tales Trilogy”, “The Unwanted Guest” and “This Too Shall Pass”.  A collection based on Moving Tales’ three animated storytelling apps, “The Classic World Tales Trilogy” Ebook is packed with digital innovations including reformatted wide screen images, user enabled Read Aloud functionality with high-lighted text, auto page turning, built-in dictionary, word search, index, bookmark, as well as a user enabled soundtrack.

“We are excited to release the Enhanced Ebook Trilogy collection of the three tales from our beloved storytelling apps of the same names”, said Moving Tales’ Matthew Talbot-Kelly. “We brought ‘The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross’, ‘The Unwanted Guest’ and ‘This Too Shall Pass’ together in one amazing feature rich Ebook volume.

In addition to the completely reformatted wide screen … Read More »

Last week we had a very rare critically misrepresentative review of our “Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross” app. In the article “How Interactive Ebooks Engage Readers and Enhance Learning”, the writer attempts to characterize “The Pedlar Lady” as not offering “any real value through interactivity”. Not only does this statement ignore the substantive interactivity in our apps, the authour chooses to ignore any educational merits in the app. (Just one example: as in all of our apps, with “The Pedlar Lady” app, a user can record their own voice to be heard alongside the provided music, sound effects and animation.) Needless to say, I find this kind of unsubstantiated journalistic “criticism” frustrating. But we can’t win – if we let the misrepresentation slip by unchallenged, it may compromise our critical presence in the digi-sphere. Yet if we respond to point out the error, we can come across as defensive and thin skinned.

With so many of the available “interactive ebooks”, the interactivity jarringly interrupts the user’s immersion in the story. Sometimes less is more. Just because one can add a gratuitous interactive moment in an app, doesn’t mean one should. We are not interested in prioritizing mindless interactive stimuli over the potential immersive qualities of the exciting new kind of storytelling experience offered by devices like the iPad. From our point of view, it’s about intention, about having the technology serve the narrative opportunity, not overwhelm it. It’s about balance, selection, editing. It’s about substance and presence. It’s about presenting a rich and resonant experience for those who give it time. … 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 »

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.

October 17th, 2011

VANCOUVER – (October 17, 2011) – Innovative App creators Moving Tales’ first eBook has been named “New & Notable” in the U.S. iTunes Book section. Based on the bestselling App of the same name, the eBook edition of The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross is a cutting edge implementation of the ePub standard. Featuring 53 fixed layout pages, audio narration, music, sound effects, searchable text and built-in dictionary, the eBook Pedlar Lady is now available for $3.99 through Apple’s iBookstore for the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone.

“We have completely reformatted our beloved Pedlar Lady tale as an eBook.” said Moving Tales founder Matthew Talbot-Kelly. “We recomposed the artwork as high resolution stills that the reader can zoom into and explore in detail. With the built-in Read Aloud functionality, the user is able to enjoy the pitch perfect narration, accompanied … Read More »

We often lose the power of the moment, because we are so rarely in it. Yet the most meaningful and rewarding aspects of living require time, and presence.

The invention of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century gave rise to a period of
information proliferation which scholars of the time bemoaned for a variety of reasons.
They lamented that, as mass production increased, the quality of printed texts diminished, but they also expressed concern that the supply of new information was ‘distracting and difficult to manage’.

Does this sound a little like 15th century information overload?

Fast forward to the age of the internet, to a world where, thanks to rapid advances in computer technology, distracting and unmanageable information overload has become a blessed curse, and is now a way of life for most of us.

I feel a keen sense of metaphysical vertigo when I try to imagine the world in another fifty or even twenty five years as information and access to information continues to grow exponentially. This is not unlike the feeling I get when I gaze up at the sky on a cloudless night – a visceral sense of seductive and paralyzing wonder as I feebly attempt to measure the significance of my life against the profusion of possibilities inherent in an ever expanding universe. Looking out from my half lit 21st century cave, the milky way of information and social networking looks and feels similarly overwhelming.

The challenge for me, fortunate enough to have been born into this fascinating and frustrating time, is to learn to live in ways that are outwardly simple, but inwardly rich.

As I aspire to live more mindfully in a complex world driven increasingly by technology,
what I am learning from the age of information overload is that breadth of knowledge is not the same as depth of knowledge, and that being good at multitasking is not the same as being able to engage meaningfully with complexity.

Although I can be as inclined as the next curious person to enjoy falling down the virtual rabbit hole of the internet, I am also learning that setting priorities and simplifying my life helps a great deal when it comes to determining what constitutes personal, meaningful engagement.

December 9th, 2011 – Vancouver (BC) Canada

Moving Tales Inc today released a completely reformatted “Twas the Night Before Christmas” iPhone app, their full colour 3D animated telling of the classic American Christmas poem. This innovative and richly detailed animated app presents the classic poem as you have never seen it. For this specially reformatted iPhone version, there are new features and a whole new level of interactivity where the user changes from one animated scene to the next by shaking the device. The app sells for $2.99 for the iPhone and iPod touch.

December 8th – Vancouver, BC
Moving Tales the creators of the innovative worldwide best selling App The Peddlar Lady releases one of the world first Interactive eBooks: Elly’s Lost & Found Sounds!