MCDM student Nicole Collins shot the film above as part of my Multimedia Storytelling class this winter.  The course stressed storytelling structure (Aristotle, Joseph Campbell), as well as the benefits of using amateur technology (Nicole used a Flip Mino HD and iMovie) to tell stories to a larger audience.

Then, we teamed up with community “clients,” in this case, Seattle’s Pacific Science Center to prove how storytelling could help reach an audience.  The PSC’s Stan Orchard was so thrilled with our students’ work, he featured Nicole’s film on the upcoming Geocaching Exhibit’s homepage, and included all of the films on the PSC site.

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Not so long ago, video experts would tell you that you didn’t need an High Definition camera if you were going to only upload your oeuvre to the Internet.  Compression was so bad on sites like YouTube that your video resolution really didn’t matter: it would still end up looking like pixellated hash.

Not any more.  It seems as if everyone has gotten HD religion in the last month or two: with the proliferation of inexpensive HD cameras (such as the Flip Mino HD and Kodak Zi6) and an upgrade of various video platforms.

Take a look at this Facebook video, shot on my Pentax W60 point-and-shoot camera (lousy for still images, but it’s waterproof and takes 720p video at 15 frames per second). It showed up with an “HD” icon on my Facebook profile:

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