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 »

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 »

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 »