Telling Stories

Source: AARP.org | May 17, 2006

Storytelling is an age-old method of entertainment as well as a means of keeping thoughts, ideas, and remembrances alive. While storytelling is traditionally a verbal skill, a new application adds an exciting multimedia slant that will help you create your own story or that of any one else.

The program, Telling Stories, is easy to install and easy to use. You enter a person's name and birthday and it automatically sets up a timeline of events. New events are easy to add. You can give the event a title, add an image, type a story, or add background music. You can even add a video.

The program has two basic views. The first is the timeline. This is where you can easily add, delete, and edit events. This area also has a series of interview questions for each event that you can use as part of the story presentation.

The second way of viewing your story is in the Presentation mode where you can view each event as a slide. You get to set the event slide properties. Each event slide can have a different background. The backgrounds that come with the program are useful, but limited. Luckily, you can easily insert your own backgrounds if you like. You can also change the fonts, the captions, the transitions, and the amount of time that the slide stays on the screen. In this area, as long as your computer has a microphone you can also add a voice recording to each slide.

The program makes it simple to insert multimedia data like pictures, videos, and music. It may a little difficult at first to understand how the images will be displayed, but the Help file is useful and the final product is workable.

When the timeline is created, birthday decade years and a series of the canned historical events are automatically added. The birthday events are usually quite useful. While the historical events do give you a sense of the world events, they will may or may not be pertinent to the story you are telling.

It is also easy to insert audio and video files. The program suggests songs that were hits in various years, but those songs are not included. Although the program will help you search the Internet for music files, I found that to be a hit or miss situation. The Telling Stories program makes it very easy to copy music from a CD. Just insert the CD into your computer and click a few buttons and you're done.

You will spend some time creating your story, but the program guides you through each step. Once complete it allows you to save the story in the program's proprietary file format or to save it as an .exe file that can be executed on any computer. The .exe file can also be written to a CD or DVD to be shared with others.

If you want to create a presentation for a special birthday or wedding anniversary you will find the Telling Stories software perfect. It is also well suited to document the life of a special person. It makes the trip down memory lane a unique multi-media journey.

Specifications

Product: Telling Stories
Manufacturer: Telling Stories, Inc.
Price: $49.95
Platform: Windows 2000 or XP. No Mac version is currently available.

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