How can create our story in Documenta

At Documenta can work directly from children from age 8 to adults.  Who can create these stories? Teachers with their students, parents with little children, or friends who want to prepare a special greeting,¡ multimedia and online!

We put some examples below, followed by some tips for making your own Christmas Stories.

Instructions and tips for the realization of the story:

 

1) The redaction:

First of all we must decide our story; we can draw on the tradition. But more beautiful is invented.

2) Illustrations:

After writing our story we create a sequence of images that illustrate it. ¡We can also make a video! Images can be scanned draws, or photographs we found on the Internet and we download on our computer. Google allows you to search by size. We recommend you narrow your search to large images.

3) The speaking:

We will record our story. It can be recorded with the phone or directly on the computer, without needing to know audio editing programs. To do so, pay attention: push the record button and speak immediately so that there is no silence before. Be careful that there is no ambient noise to hear the voice as clear as possible.

If you do not want to record the story, we can then find music to be associated with our images.

4) Multimedia work at Documenta:

Now that we have all the materials we need, we will go to www.mydocumenta.com and create an account.

If we make the story among many, all we have to enlist in Documenta and create working groups to co-edit the stories (watch video to create working groups)

When you join on Documenta, you create your web address and your online workspace, where you will be able to edit all your projects and pages, and display them if you choose to do so. Enter your login and password and you enter into your work space. When you enter Documenta you see a series of buttons on the lower right corner of the screen. Click on the first, the New Project. Enter a name and description for your project and Documenta will ask you to upload the files. A simple click allows you to upload almost any type of file, in any format. In addition, this can all be done at the same time, without the need to separate them into video, audio or image files etc.

When you upload, DOCUMENTA recognizes and organizes your files by category depending on the type: images, videos, sound or attached document.

When your files have been uploaded you will be in “Resource Manager”. Click on “Done” and you will get back to your project and can continue editing it.

When you create a new Documenta Project you always have a grid made up of a particular number of cells to refer to. You can customise this grid to adapt to your project needs: change colours, increase or reduce the number of cells, merge various cells, etc

For our story we will create a simple grid of 2 columns x 1 row. We thus created a page with 2 cells.

Creating the image sequence. We started to drag our images from the library to the cell to the right, you can enter up to 30 pictures in sequence. Then drag our speech to the same cell that contains the images. Already created the sequence, now click on the cell to access the sequence editor.

In the Sequence Editor:

1) Put the image sequence in loop. The reason is because when you just play your sequence of images, stopping the playback will also stop the audio, but audio duration is greater. If we put the images in loop so we ensure that our audio is played in full.

2) Next to the PLAY and STOP commands located under the display, activate the option of FITTING PICTURES AT 100% IN THE CELL. So we could see our images completely.

3) We can also rearrange the images in the sequence simply dragging them from one position to another, delete some, add others, etc.

4) We save our sequence.

Now, editing the project again, we’re going right to the top menu and select OPTIONS: Preview of the project: Once in preview, click in the cell to activate the sequence with the audio. To stop, click again on it.

Lets introduce the text.
To edit the project again, single-click on the project icon and click on the “Edit project” button next to the New Project.

To add text to a cell, go to an empty cell and click on it. This takes you to the Text Editor. Now you can add and format your texts.

When you open a text editor you will find two fields.

In the field above write the title of the story (rather large), followed by the beginning of our text, by way of introduction.

In the field below write our full text.

Below each text field in the text editor there is a black border with tools for formatting text, you can modify typography, the size of the font, colour… you can also change the cell colour.

Previewing the project:

Save the project go to the menu on the top right of the screen and choose: “Previewing the project” (or you can double-click on the project icon).

Once in preview, we see that the page displays by default the text we had written in the field above the editor. By clicking on the text, then displays the entire text of the story that we introduced in the field below the editor.

If we click on the image, we can read the story while playing with the audio sequence.

Finally, we can give fixed dimensions to our project by clicking on the buttons in the lower right, zoom in and out, and writing in the exact size we want for our page in pixels.