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Classroom Resources
Take your class on an interactive journey aboard The Boat using the SBS Learn resources.
Download a copy of The Boat Creative Activities (English/The Arts years 9-12)
Download a copy of The Boat Comprehension Activity (English years 9-12)

Due to infrequent coarse language, this resource is not recommended for students under 15 years.

SBS recommends reading the Classroom Viewing Recommendations before using this resource in schools.

Creative Activities
Allow 20minutes to experience The Boat before working on the activities below.
Creative Writing

Twitter Fiction: Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets". Twitter fiction aims to tell a story in just 140 characters.

TASK: Imagine that you are like Mai, an asylum seeker on a boat. Capture your experience in a 140-character Twitter fiction. See an example here

Share your Twitter fiction #sbslearn #sbstheboat

Art

Blackout Poetry: Blackout poetry is essentially making art with 'found' words. The process involves selecting a piece of text - usually a newspaper article - and using a black permanent marker, blacking out the majority of the words, leaving behind a poem constructed of words from various sentences.

TASK: Create your own blackout poem that captures the emotions felt by Mai at the end of her boat journey. Consider experimenting with patterns and colours to cover up your unwanted words, instead of just black permanent marker. See an example here

Share an image of your blackout poetry #sbslearn #sbstheboat

Media

Digital Storytelling: This is a genre of storytelling that is short, personal and emotive. Each story consists of images, voice-over narrative and simple sound effects. The narrative is typically no longer than 250 words with the story itself being no more than two minutes long.

TASK: Create a digital story that tells Truong's perspective of his journey on the boat. See an example here

Share your digital story #sbslearn #sbstheboat

Meet the Artist

The Boat was illustrated by Vietnamese-Australian artist Matt Huynh, whose parents fled Vietnam after the war, like Mai. The following clips and activities examine the creative process behind the graphic novel as well as Huynh's personal connection to the story.

Coming into Being

Download the transcript
Watch the clip 'Coming into Being' before completing the activity below.
Art

Matt Huynh tells how he felt most like a storyteller when he was drawing the original thumbnails for The Boat.

TASK: Create a four-frame comic panel that captures the emotion of a character. You should vary the perspective and focus of this person, by using a range of shot types. For example, you might have two close-up shots (one of an eye, and one of a hand), one long shot (showing their whole body) and one mid-shot (focusing on the facial features). Emotions to choose from could be: despair, elation, frustration, sympathy, shock, curiosity.

Share your comic panel #sbslearn #sbstheboat

About the Characters

Download the transcript
Watch the clip 'About the Characters' before completing the activity below.
Art

Matt Huynh explains how it takes many attempts of drawing a character before fully understanding them. Capturing a character's emotions is very difficult, especially if you are not a confident artist. One way of capturing a person's character is by putting their emotions in motion using exaggerated body language and movement.

TASK: Capture the character of a friend of family member through caricature. Give them exaggerated gestures and movement by drawing them doing a range of actions such as running, jumping, flying and tumbling.

About the Boat

Download the transcript.
Watch the clip 'About the Boat' before completing the activity below.
Creative writing

Matt Huynh speaks about how the boat is a conceit as it acts as both a setting and a character, which ultimately shares Mai's journey.

TASK: Flash fiction is a type of storytelling that is very short - typically as short as 300 words. Compose a flash fiction that personifies a location you are very familiar with. For example, if you gave emotions and a voice to your bedroom, what would it say? For tips on writing great flash fiction, scroll to the end of this article.

Personal Relationship

Download the transcript.
Watch the clip 'Personal Relationship' before completing the activity below.
Creative writing: Matt Huynh reveals that the purpose of his work is to have people connect with the more vulnerable parts of the population, such as asylum seekers and refugees.

TASK: Text message stories are designed to be brief enough to send in a single text message, but powerful enough to explore themes, and develop believable characters and settings. Compose a text message story of exactly 150 words that simultaneously provokes the reader to consider a significant political or humanitarian issue and creates feelings of empathy and connection. Share your text message story #sbslearn #sbstheboat

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Take your class on an interactive journey aboard The Boat using the SBS Learn resources. Download a copy of The Boat Creative Activities (English/The Arts years 9-12) Download a copy of The Boat Comprehension Activity (English years 9-12) Due to infrequent coarse language, this resource is not recommended for students under 15 years.

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A Game of Shark
And Minnow

Ayungin Shoal lies 105 nautical miles from the Philippines. There's little to commend the spot, apart from its plentiful fish and safe harbor - except that Ayungin sits at the southwestern edge of an area called Reed Bank, which is rumored to contain vast reserves of oil and natural gas. And also that it is home to a World War II-era ship called the Sierra Madre, which the Philippine government ran aground on the reef in 1999 and has since maintained as a kind of post-apocalyptic military garrison, the small detachment of Filipino troops stationed there struggling to survive extreme mental and physical desolation. Of all places, the scorched shell of the Sierra Madre has become an unlikely battleground in a geopolitical struggle that will shape the future of the South China Sea and, to some extent, the rest of the world.

In early August, after an overnight journey in a fishing boat that had seen better days, we approached Ayungin from the south and came upon two Chinese Coast Guard cutters stationed at either side of the reef. We were a small group: two Westerners and a few Filipinos, led by Mayor Eugenio Bito-onon Jr., whose territory includes most of the Philippine land claims in the South China Sea. The Chinese presence at Ayungin had spooked the Philippine Navy out of undertaking its regular run to resupply the troops there, but the Chinese were still letting some fishing boats through. We were to behave as any regular fishing vessel with engine trouble or a need for shelter in the shoal would, which meant no radio contact. As we throttled down a few miles out and waited to see what the Chinese Coast Guard might do, there was only an eerie quiet.

Bito-onon stood at the prow, nervously eyeing the cutters. Visits to his constituents on the island of Pag-asa, farther northwest, take him past Ayungin fairly frequently, and the mayor has had his share of run-ins. Last October, he said, a Chinese warship crossed through his convoy twice, at very high speed, nearly severing a towline connecting two boats. This past May, as the mayor's boat neared Ayungin in the middle of the night, a Chinese patrol trained its spotlight on the boat and tailed it for an hour, until it became clear that it wasn't headed to Ayungin. "They are becoming more aggressive," the mayor said. "We didn't know if they would ram us."

We didn't know if they would ram us, either. As we approached, we watched through binoculars and a camera viewfinder to see if the Chinese boats would try to head us off. After a few tense moments, it became clear that they were going to stay put and let us pass. Soon we were inside the reef, the Sierra Madre directly in front of us. As we chugged around to the starboard side, two marines peered down uncertainly from the top of the long boarding ladder. The ship's ancient communications and radar equipment loomed above them, looking as if it could topple over at any time. After a series of rapid exchanges with the mayor, the marines motioned for us to throw up our boat's ropes. Within a minute or two the fishing boat was moored and we were handing up our bags, along with cases of Coca-Cola and Dunkin' Donuts that naval command had sent along as pasalubong, gifts for the hungry men on board.

But before we had much time to think about that, someone pointed out that the Chinese boats had started to move. They left their positions to the east and west of the reef and began to converge just off the starboard side, where the reef came closest to the ship.

The mayor and several others stood quietly on deck, watching them as they came. The message from the Chinese was unmistakable: We see you, we've got our eye on you, we are here.

As the Chinese boats made their half-circle in front of the Sierra Madre, the mayor mimed the act of them filming us. "Wave," he said. "We're going to be big on YouTube."

Dangerous Ground

To understand how Ayungin (known to the Western world as Second Thomas Shoal) could become contested ground is to confront, in miniature, both the rise of China and the potential future of U.S. foreign policy. It is also to enter into a morass of competing historical, territorial and even moral claims in an area where defining what is true or fair may be no easier than it has proved to be in the Middle East.

The Spratly Islands sprawl over roughly 160,000 square miles in the waters of the coasts of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and China - all of whom claim part of the islands.

The Cabbage Strategy

China is currently in disputes with several of its neighbors, and the Chinese have become decidedly more willing to wield a heavy stick. There is a growing sense that they have been waiting a long time to flex their muscles and that that time has finally arrived. "Nothing in China happens overnight," Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, the director of Asia-Pacific programs at the United States Institute of Peace, said. "Any move you see was planned and prepared for years, if not more. So obviously this maritime issue is very important to China."

It is also very important to the United States, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made clear at a gathering of the Association of Southeast Nations (Asean) in Hanoi in July 2010. Clinton declared that freedom of navigation in the South China Sea was a "national interest" of the United States, and that "legitimate claims to maritime space in the South China Sea should be derived solely from legitimate claims to land features," which could be taken to mean that China's nine-dash line was illegitimate. The Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, chafed visibly, left the meeting for an hour and returned only to launch into a long, vituperative speech about the danger of cooperation with outside powers.

President Obama and his representatives have reiterated America's interest in the region ever since. The Americans pointedly refuse to take sides in the sovereignty disputes. But China's behavior as it becomes more powerful, along with freedom of navigation and control over South China Sea shipping lanes, will be among the major global political issues of the 21st century. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, of the $5.3 trillion in global trade that transits the South China Sea each year, $1.2 trillion of it touches U.S. ports - and so American foreign policy has begun to shift accordingly.

In a major speech in Singapore last year, Leon Panetta, then the secretary of defense, described the coming pivot in U.S. strategy in precise terms: "While the U.S. will remain a global force for security and stability, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region." He referred to the United States as a "Pacific nation," with a capital "P" and no irony, and then announced a series of changes - most notably that the roughly 50-50 balance of U.S. naval forces between the Pacific and the Atlantic would become 60-40 Pacific by 2020. Given the size of the U.S. Navy, this is enormously significant.

In June of last year, the United States helped broker an agreement for both China's and the Philippines's ships to leave Scarborough Shoal peacefully, but China never left. They eventually blocked access to the shoal and filled in a nest of boats around it to ward off foreign fishermen.

"Since [the standoff], we have begun to take measures to seal and control the areas around the Huangyan Island," Maj. Gen. Zhang Zhaozhong, of China's People's Liberation Army, said in a television interview in May, using the Chinese term for Scarborough. (That there are three different names for the same set of uninhabitable rocks tells you much of what you need to know about the region.) He described a "cabbage strategy," which entails surrounding a contested area with so many boats - fishermen, fishing administration ships, marine surveillance ships, navy warships - that "the island is thus wrapped layer by layer like a cabbage."

There can be no question that the cabbage strategy is in effect now at Ayungin and has been at least since May. General Zhang, in his interview several months ago, listed Ren'ai Shoal (the Chinese name for Ayungin) in the P.L.A.'s "series of achievements" in the South China Sea. He had already put it in the win column, even though eight Filipino marines still live there. He also seemed to take some pleasure in the strategy. Of taking territory from the Philippines, he said: "We should do more such things in the future. For those small islands, only a few troopers are able to station on each of them, but there is no food or even drinking water there. If we carry out the cabbage strategy, you will not be able to send food and drinking water onto the islands. Without the supply for one or two weeks, the troopers stationed there will leave the islands on their own. Once they have left, they will never be able to come back."

'If You Want to Live, Eat'

On the deck of the Sierra Madre, with morning sun slanting off the bright blue water and the crowing of a rooster for a soundtrack, Staff Sgt. Joey Loresto and Sgt. Roy Yanto were improvising. Yanto, a soft-spoken 31-year-old, had lost an arrow spearfishing on the shoal the day before. Now he had pulled the handle off an old bucket and was banging it straight with a rusty mallet in an attempt to make it into a spear. Everything on the Sierra Madre was this way - improvised, repurposed. "Others came prepared," Loresto said of previous detachments that had been briefed about life on the boat before they arrived and knew they would need to fish to supplement their diet. "But we were not prepared."

Yanto lived alone at the stern of the boat, in a room with a bed, a mosquito net, an M-16 propped against the wall and nothing but a tarp wrapped around a steel bar to separate him from the sea. He also took care of the three fighting cocks on the boat. They were lashed to various perches at the stern and took great pleasure in crowing at anybody who tried to use the "toilet," a seatless ceramic bowl suspended over the water by iron pipes and plywood.

Yanto has a wife and a 6-year-old son back in Zamboanga City. Like the others, he is able to talk to his family once a week or so, when they call in to one of the two satellite phones that the men take care to keep dry and charged. "It's enough for me," he said, of the 5 or 10 minutes he gets on the phone with his family. "What's important is that I heard their voice."

Like Yanto, Loresto was wearing a sleeveless jersey with "MARINES" printed across the front and a section of mesh between the chest and waistline, uniforms for the world's most exotic basketball team. "It's a lonely place," Loresto said. "But we make ourselves busy, always busy."

When his arrow was complete, Yanto turned to two tubs covered in plastic, which were filled with fish that he had picked off his line the previous night. Fishing lines descended at regular intervals from the port side of the boat, with each soldier responsible for his own; they spend hours tending to them. Yanto split the fish open, covered them with salt, then laid them out to dry on a plank hanging above the deck. "Good for breakfast," he said, gesturing to the fish he was putting up.

The men depend on fish - fresh, fried, dried - as their main means of physical survival. They were all undernourished and losing weight, even though eating and meal prep were the main activities on board, after fishing. Asked what meal he missed most from the mainland, Yanto said, "Vegetables," without hesitation. "That's more important than meat or any other kind of dish." The motto of the boat, spray-painted on the wall near the kitchen, was " Kumain ang gustong mabuhay " - basically: "If you want to live, eat."

In the long hours between lunch and dinner, most of the men would disappear into their quarters to pass the time. Aside from Yanto and the one Navy seaman on board, who occupied an aerie above everybody else, the marines lived in the old officer's quarters and on the boat's bridge. When the Sierra Madre was first driven up on the shoal in 1999, it was apparently a desired posting: there was less rust, you could sleep wherever you wanted and people played basketball in the vast tank space below deck. (Now that space was filled with standing water and whatever trash the men threw into it.) Aside from the quarters, which were themselves full of leaks and rust, there was hardly any place inside the boat to congregate that wasn't either a health hazard, full of water or open to the elements. In bad weather, they gathered in the communications room on the second floor, where Loresto's DVD player and computer were kept, to watch movies or sing karaoke. (They were all pretty good, but Yanto stood out. He nailed George Michael's "Careless Whisper," down to the vividly emotional hand gestures.) If they weren't at the computer, they were just off to the side, in a small, dark workout area that held an exercise bike (extra resistance supplied by pulling a strap with your hands), an ancient bench press and a bunch of Vietnam-era American communications equipment.

The Sierra Madre at one time was the U.S.S. Harnett County, built as a tank-landing ship for World War II and then repurposed as a floating helicopter and speedboat hub in the rivers of Vietnam. In 1970 the U.S. gave the ship to the South Vietnamese, and in 1976 it was passed on to the Philippines. But nobody had ever taken the time to strip all of the communications gear or even old U.S. logbooks and a fleet guide from 1970.

In good weather, the men socialized outside, under the corrugated-tin roof that sheltered the boat's small kitchen and living area. The "walls" were tarps, repurposed doors, old metal sheets and the backs of storage lockers. The "floor" consisted of two large canted metal plates that met in the middle of the boat, suspended above a large void in the deck. The plates popped and echoed with deep thuds whenever anybody walked over them. Everything was on an incline, so the legs of the peeling-leather couches and tables were sawed to various lengths to square their surfaces. A locker at the center, the driest spot on deck, held mostly inoperable electronic equipment and a small television that had a satellite connection but stayed on for only five minutes at a time. The men got together in the evenings to watch the Philippine squad make a surprising run in the FIBA Asia basketball tournament, only to be interrupted as the television repeatedly went dark. To fix it they had to insert a thin metal wire into a hole in the set and then power the machine off and back on again. "Defective," one of marines said, by way of explanation. Loresto smiled and shook his head. "Overuse," he said.

Loresto was the life of the boat. When the men played pusoy dos, a variation of poker, he displayed an impressive and sustained level of exuberance, often plastering the winning card to his forehead, face out, and shouting with laughter. He comes from Ipilan, on the island of Palawan. He's 35, with a wife and three children, ages 2, 10 and 12. Before this posting, he spent 10 years fighting Islamic extremists in Mindanao, the southernmost island group in the Philippine archipelago. Asked whether he preferred combat or the Sierra Madre, Loresto thought for a second and then said, "Combat."

He also had one of the only real military jobs on the boat, manning the radio and reporting the number and behavior of the boats outside the shoal. He was also the one to note and record that a U.S. intelligence plane, a P-3C Orion, tended to fly over the shoal whenever the Chinese made a significant tactical shift.

One morning, as a Chinese boat circled slowly off the Sierra Madre's starboard side, Mayor Bito-onon pulled out his computer to deliver a PowerPoint presentation about the various Philippine-held islands in the Spratlys. Most of the men had never seen anything like it before, and they gathered eagerly behind the mayor as he sat on a bench and walked them through it. Bito-onon was surprised at how little they knew about the struggle that was playing out around them. "They are blank, blank," he told me after the presentation. "They don't even know what's on the nightly news."

Other than a couple of jokes about "visiting China without a passport" (i.e., being captured), life at the tip of the gun didn't feel much like life at the tip of a gun. It felt more like the world's most surreal fishing camp. The Chinese boats were always there, but they were a source more of mystery than fear. "We don't know why they're out there," Yanto said at one point. "Are they looking for us? What is their intention?"

To Bito-onon, the Chinese intentions were clear. At breakfast he had said, "They could come take this at any time, and everybody knows it." What would these guys do if that happened? He raised both hands, smiled and said, "Surrender."

Later, as he sat on the bamboo bench that was his workplace, television-viewing station and bed for five days and nights on the deck of the Sierra Madre, he talked about Ayungin as the staging ground for China's domination of the Pacific. "The Chinese want both the fisheries and the gas. They're using their fisheries to dominate the area, but the oil is the target." Almost as if on cue, one of the Chinese Coast Guard cutters chased off a fishing boat north of the shoal. As the mayor watched, he said that he hoped they wouldn't do the same to our boat when we tried to leave. "What does that mean for me if they do?" he asked. "I can't even come here or to Pag-asa?" Earlier he joked about the headline if the Chinese stopped him: "A Mayor Was Caught in His Own Territory!"

Threadbare Settlements

The official name of the mayor's domain is the Kalayaan Island Group, which technically encompasses most of the Spratlys but in reality amounts to five islands, two sandbars and two reefs that the Philippines currently controls. He has 288 voting constituents, of which about 120 live at any one time on Pag-asa, the only island with a civilian population.

He is a slender, spry man of 57, with a quirky sense of humor that enables him to leaven his criticisms of graft and corruption at the higher levels of the Philippine government with friendly jokes and oblique asides. But his frustration with the lack of resources and the lack of political will is obvious. The Philippines, he says, has done very little to develop the islands they hold, while Vietnam and Malaysia have turned some of the reefs and islands they occupy into resorts that the Chinese would find much more difficult to justify taking as their own. Except for Pag-asa, the Philippines has mustered only the most threadbare of settlements, some even more desolate than Ayungin.

Three days later, we would ride in a small dinghy over the break and up onto the sloped beach of Lawak, 60 nautical miles to the north of the Sierra Madre. Like Ayungin, Lawak serves as a strategic gateway to the rich oil and gas reserves of the Reed Bank. Unlike Ayungin, Lawak also happens to look like a postcard picture of a deserted-island paradise - a circle of crushed-coral beach enclosing nearly 20 acres of scrub grass, palm trees, a bird sanctuary and a sea-turtle nesting ground.

Second Lt. Robinson Retoriano runs the detachment of 11 worn Filipino troops there. Most of the men under his command wear shorts, flip-flops and tank tops, but he led us on a tour of the island in full camouflage, pointing out with pride their recently constructed barracks and a basketball court with a spectator swing made of "drifted things."

As we sat down in the courtyard, Pfc. Juan Colot, an M-16 slung low off his bony shoulders, whistled to the camp's domesticated gull, which flew directly into his hands and chirped complacently. Retoriano is from Manila, and when we asked what a city boy like him was doing on an island in the middle of the South China Sea, he said, "I'm still wondering myself."

In some ways, the guys on Lawak were even more isolated than Loresto and Yanto and the others on Ayungin. They were not allowed any use of the satellite phones whatsoever, not even for calls from loved ones. "It doubles the distance," Retoriano said. To combat the loneliness, Retoriano sometimes gave the marines jobs to do, just to keep them busy. In the mornings they got up at 6 to sweep the camp. In the afternoons they fixed their hammocks outside, to sleep in the fresh air.

Over the course of a few hours, Retoriano referred to the island as "paradise" several times - which it was, if you focused on its physical beauty and didn't think of how hard it would be to actually live there. And in truth these guys had it better than some of the other detachments - Kota, Parola, Likas, Rizal Reef, Patag - because at least they had ground to live and sleep on.

The settlements on Rizal Reef, Patag and Panata are mostly crude stilted structures over shallow water or small sandbars, with very little room to maneuver and fishing as the sole activity and consolation. According to Bito-onon, the troops on Rizal Reef used to tie themselves to empty oil drums when there was particularly bad weather at night, so that if a high sea or an errant piece of ocean debris wiped out the stilts, they'd at least be able to float.

"A lot of Filipino people might not know why we're fighting for these islands," Retoriano said as we prepared to leave Lawak. "But once you see it, and you've stepped on it, you understand. It's ours." He accompanied us into the water and out to our launch boat, still in full fatigues and big black combat boots, getting drenched up to his chest. As he helped me swing up and over the lip of our boat, he said, "I'm glad we didn't talk much about the sensitive political situation. But if you ask me, I think China is just a big bully."

'I've Never Seen More White Knuckles'

The Philippines' best hope for resisting China currently resides inside a set of glassy offices in the heart of the K Street power corridor in Washington. There, Paul Reichler, a lawyer at Foley Hoag who specializes in international territorial disputes, serves as the lead attorney for the Philippines in its arbitration case over their claims in the South China Sea. Initiated in January, the case seeks to invalidate China's nine-dash line and establish that the territorial rights be governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which both China and the Philippines have signed and ratified. The subtleties of the case revolve around E.E.Z.'s and continental shelves, without expressly resolving sovereignty issues. China has refused to participate, but the Philippines has proceeded anyway.

The key element, as far as the Sierra Madre is concerned, is that the case is growing to reflect the new reality on the water. "Ayungin will be part of the case now, now that the Chinese have virtually occupied it," Reichler told me. He was hoping that the tribunal would define Ayungin as a "submerged feature." A submerged feature, he explained, is considered part of the seabed and belongs to whoever owns the continental shelf underneath it, not to whoever happens to be occupying it. "The fact that somebody physically occupies it doesn't give them any rights," he said.

This took a second to sink in. Historically, the physical presence of troops on the Sierra Madre had been a vital part of the Filipino strategy; currently their presence was the only thing stopping a complete Chinese takeover there. Wasn't that against the Philippines' own interests? "No," Reichler said. "Not if we're not occupying it." What he meant was that the Philippines wants to nullify any claim to a submerged feature based on who has control above the water - which applies beyond Ayungin to Mischief Reef and others, which the Chinese currently occupy. Surely this is a strong legal strategy, calibrated for an international tribunal. But if this is the strategy, you couldn't help wondering what those guys were still doing out there, getting choked off a little bit more each day, while the legal process sought to make them irrelevant.

Mischief, a submerged reef similar to Ayungin and roughly 20 miles to its west, makes for an instructive example. It used to belong to the Philippines, but in 1994 the Chinese took advantage of a lull in Filipino maritime patrols caused by a passing typhoon and rapidly erected a stilted structure that they then made clear they were not going to leave. Slowly they turned it into a military outpost, over the repeated protests of the Filipinos, and now it serves as a safe harbor for the Chinese ships that patrol Ayungin and other areas.

What China has done with Mischief, Scarborough and now with Ayungin is what the journalist Robert Haddick described, writing in Foreign Policy, as "salami slicing" or "the slow accumulation of actions, none of which is a casus belli, but which add up over time to a major strategic change." Huang Jing, the director of the Center on Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, noted that in all of these conflicts - Scarborough, Ayungin - China insists on sending its civilian maritime force, which is theoretically unarmed. This has a powerful double significance: first, that the Chinese don't want to start a war, even though in many ways they are playing the aggressor; and second, that they view any matter in the South China Sea as an internal affair. As Huang put it: "What China is doing is putting both hands behind its back and using its big belly to push you out, to dare you to hit first. And this has been quite effective."

In bringing their complaints to arbitration, the Philippines has used the only real lever it has: to try to occupy the moral high ground and focus international attention on the issue. In response, China has tried to isolate the Philippines - discouraging President Benigno S. Aquino III from attending the China-Asean Expo in Nanning last month and continuing to steer the Asean agenda away from a final agreement on a legally binding code of conduct in the South China Sea. (One former U.S. official told me, "So far, China has been able to split Asean the way you would split a cord of wood.") China has stated that they view the overlapping claims as bilateral issues, to be negotiated between China and each individual claimant one at a time, a strategy that maximizes what China can extract from each party.

While an arbitration outcome unfavorable to the Chinese - which could be decided as early as March 2015 - would create some public-perception problems for them, China is unlikely to be deterred, in part because there is no enforcement mechanism. "Let's be honest," Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt says, "China has essentially studied how the U.S. has conducted its hegemony, and they're saying, 'We have to respect some court case?' They say that the United States blatantly violates international law when it's in its interest. China sees this as what first-class powers do." (Multiple requests for comment from the Chinese government went unanswered.)

The official U.S. position, articulated by Secretaries Clinton and Kerry, has been that the U.S. will not take sides in disputes over sovereignty. As the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Daniel R. Russel, told me, "Our primary interest is in maintaining peace, security and stability that allows for economic growth and avoids tension or conflict." Basically, we're staying out of it. But the U.S. has stepped up its joint operations with the Philippines, including a recent mock amphibious landing not far from Scarborough Shoal. There has also been talk of increasing U.S. troop rotations into some of its former bases.

"I think we want to find a way to restrain China and reassure the Philippines without getting ourselves into a shooting war," James Steinberg, the former deputy secretary of state under Hillary Clinton, told me. "We have a broad interest in China behaving responsibly. But sovereignty over the Spratly Islands is not our dispute. We need to find a way to be engaged without being in the middle." Kurt Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state with the Obama administration, put it more bluntly: "Maritime territorial disputes are the hardest problem, bar none, that diplomats are currently facing in Asia. On all of these issues, no country has any flexibility. I've never seen more white knuckles."

According to Huang Jing: "Everyone in this region is playing a double game. Ten years ago, the United States was absolutely dominant in the region - economically, politically, militarily. People only had one yardstick to measure their national interest and their foreign policy, and the name of that yardstick was U.S.A. Now there are two yardsticks. On the political one, it's still the U.S., but on the economic one, it is China."

The United States does not have the unlimited leverage that it once did, and so for the time being it is allowing the Chinese to slice their salami all the way up onto the shallows of Ayungin.

Beneath a Ceiling of Clouds

The first rains of the typhoon came after dark, howling sideways across the deck of the Sierra Madre. We'd been hearing about the storm for a couple of days over the radio, tracking its course as it made landfall on Luzon and then turned west toward the South China Sea.

Under the supervision of Second Lt. Charlie Claro, the 29-year-old commander of the outpost, the men drilled holes in the boards with hand-cranks and pulled old, bent, rusted nails out of stray pieces of wood, hammered them straight, then reused them.

By nightfall, the wind had intensified into a gale. We gathered in the living area to listen to it, more awed than scared. Lieutenant Claro surfaced every so often to make sure that his improvements were holding. The rest of the marines stayed inside, singing karaoke. Later, they watched the FIBA Asia finals, the Philippines vs. Iran. Miraculously, the satellite held for most of the game. It felt as if the wind might rip the roof off from above our heads, but the marines were in good cheer. A victory for the underdog Philippine squad would have made for a nice David and Goliath moment in a David and Goliath kind of story, but the Iranians appeared to be about nine inches taller at every position and were just too much for the Filipinos. At halftime the marines went out to check on whether their fishing lines were surviving the storm, then straggled off to bed.

The next two days passed with wind and rain and long hours with nothing to do. Yanto and Loresto led a tour of the cavernous, foul tank space below decks, where old fluorescent light bays hung overhead on dangerously rusted cables.

We started to be able to identify individual marines by their footfalls. Jokes that weren't funny doubled us over. At one point, Pfc. Michael Navata walked in from checking his fishing line and said: "Cards. To pass the time." We played hours of pusoy dos, making fun of one another, volume levels rising every time Loresto stuck the two of diamonds on his forehead. The slow, steady backbeat of bad weather and desolation fell away for a while, and it felt as if we could have been in Loresto's living room in Ipilan. Yanto sat to my left, coaching me out of charity, his nonverbal instruction registering levels of depth and intelligence that language hadn't made available to us. For a moment we could see them as they really were, these marines: men who were serving their country in an extreme and unrelenting and even somewhat humiliating situation and trying bravely to make the best of it.

On the afternoon of the second bad day, the sun came out. Yanto promptly went spearfishing. One by one, the other marines stripped down and jumped in. This turned into most of us taking turns leaping off the high starboard side of the Sierra Madre, about halfway up the deck, down into the light blue water below. You had to pick your way barefoot up to the rusted lip and then, with everybody watching, try to forget that you were on a devastated ancient boat run aground on a reef in the shark-infested South China Sea and just jump. It was maybe a 30-foot drop, which took a half-second longer than you expected it to, but the water was warm and clear. We splashed around on our backs like otters. The storm had passed, and we were safe. Lieutenant Claro led a small group in a swim around our fishing boat, which he pronounced seaworthy, but then proceeded to chuckle about for several minutes. It was so woeful looking. After five days on the Sierra Madre, it was also a reminder of the real world, of how we had gotten there, and of the fact that we'd be leaving soon while these guys had to stay behind and eat to live.

Flying Past the Death Star

A month or so later, I spoke with a U.S. pilot with extensive combat experience and knowledge of Special Forces operations. I wanted to know what the American foreign-policy pivot looked like from the inside, and he was willing to tell me only if I didn't name him. "The Chinese are more aggressive because we're not around," he said. His most recent training would seem to reflect the American rebalancing to the Pacific theater: more counter-Chinese-technology operations, more engagement over water, island-hopping campaigns. He said that the joint operations with the Philippines were "a show of presence: Hey, we're [expletive] sailing through the South China Sea, look at us. And you can't do a thing about it." But then he paused. "It's funny, because China's not that far from doing that off the California coast."

Whatever America's pivot might be, there's no denying that Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific, is historically where United States foreign policy - and too many young men sent out to enforce it - has gone to die. For now, the course is a diplomatic one: the Philippines pursues its arbitration, the Asean states apply pressure for a binding code of conduct in the South China Sea, and the United States counsels patience (within reason) and the peaceful resolution of disputes. As it turns out, this somewhat scattershot approach may actually be starting to work. The Chinese leadership has undertaken a new charm offensive of late, visiting the capitals of some Asean countries (notably not the Philippines) and signaling that it might be willing to soften its positions on adopting a code of conduct and multilateral negotiations.

At the East Asia Summit meetings in Brunei two weeks ago (which John Kerry attended in place of President Obama because of the government shutdown), Kerry pushed for a quick implementation of a binding code of conduct. "That's sort of a new thing," Ricky Carandang, the secretary of communications for the Philippines, told me when we spoke after the meetings. "He said, 'We welcome a code of conduct, we welcome legal processes and we think these things should happen faster.' That's different from saying, 'Hey, let's do what we can to avoid tension, and we're not picking sides here.' " But Carandang also noted that Obama's absence in Brunei had allowed the Chinese to loom larger. If he fails to show up to the next meeting, or the administration fails to follow up on some of its promises, the Southeast Asian nations will have cause to wonder about our resolve. (Obama is said to be mulling a trip to Asia in the spring.)

Nobody is questioning China's resolve. The day after we left Ayungin, we arrived at the island of Pag-asa, the mayor's home base and the place for which he has the grandest plans - a resort, a commercial fishery, a sheltered port. As we pulled in, we saw several large Chinese fishing boats a couple of miles off the island. Aerial photos would later confirm that they were cutting coral from the reef, which is often done to harvest giant clams and other rare species. Nobody on Pag-asa, with its broken boats, low-slung civilian buildings and quiet Air Force base, could do anything about it. There was recently a food shortage because the last two Filipino naval resupply vessels haven't been able to make the trip because of inclement weather. After a night there, rather than getting back on our fishing boat for a 30-hour journey, we were happy to board a Philippine naval plane and begin the trip home.

It's easy to make China out as the villain in all of this. Most Western narratives do, even though several U.S. government officials assured me that there weren't truly any "good guys" in these territorial disputes. One benefit of China's political system, whatever its problems, is its farsightedness, its ability to stomach intense upheaval in the present in order to achieve a long-term goal.

Subi was a result of this commitment. After spending a few days on Pag-asa, where everything is free but nothing works quite like it's supposed to, it was hard not to see Subi reef as the Death Star.

An hour later, we flew over Lawak, where we'd met Lieutenant Retoriano. Soon after, the pilot asked Ashley Gilbertson, the photographer on our trip, to put his headset on. We were due north of Ayungin, and our pilot had radioed the guys on the Sierra Madre to see how they were doing. Loresto answered the call, and when he heard that we were on the plane, he asked to speak with us. Gilbertson put on the headset and smiled as broadly as he'd smiled since the night Loresto fleeced us at pusoy dos during the typhoon. The weather was good, Loresto said; they were going spearfishing that afternoon. Didn't we want to come down and join them? There was animated talk about karaoke, and then Loresto signed off. It was obviously the last time that we would ever talk to him, or maybe that any Filipino would ever be at that radio post to talk to anybody like us.

The entire world has an interest in the South China Sea, but China has nearly 1.4 billion mouths and a growing appetite for nationalism to feed, which is a kind of pressure that no other country can understand. What will happen will happen, whatever the letter of the Asean code of conduct or however the arbitration turns out. Loresto and Yanto, meanwhile, still abide on the Sierra Madre, fishing for their subsistence and watching the surf to see what wave the Chinese will choose to ride in on.

"You've got the wrong science-fiction movie," one former highly placed U.S. official later told me, when I described what we saw at Subi, and what it might mean for the guys on Ayungin. "It's not the Death Star. It's actually the Borg from 'Star Trek': 'You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.' " The scholar Huang Jing put it another, more organic way. "The Chinese expand like a forest, very slowly," he said. "But once they get there, they never leave."

Editor: Joel Lovell

Jeff Himmelman is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of "Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee." He last wrote for the magazine about Frank Ocean.

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A Game of SharkAnd Minnow Ayungin Shoal lies 105 nautical miles from the Philippines. There's little to commend the spot, apart from its plentiful fish and safe harbor - except that Ayungin sits at the southwestern edge of an area called Reed Bank, which is rumored to contain vast reserves of oil and natural gas.

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Surviving Hiroshima's Atomic Bomb

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When I came to again, I was covered by debris. All I could see was a broken ceiling and through it, the grey sky. I assumed a bomb had fallen directly on our house.

In my mind, I heard tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima screaming. I don't know if that's true, but it's what I remember.

My sister and I were clinging to each other. We tried to crawl out.

To make sure we were all right, we siblings were calling to each other: "Junko-chan!" "Tei-chan!" "Aki-chan!" "Where are you? We're here."

I found my eldest sister in what was left of the dining room. She was covered in blood.

I wondered why there was all that blood over her. She was hurt, and one of her teeth was missing.

The shock had sent one of the chopsticks she was holding through her cheek, poking out the tooth.

Our brother was in another room. The window behind him had shattered. When the window broke with a bang, his back was pierced by splinters of shattered glass.

We were all in a panic. To get out into the yard, we were treading on the shattered glass barefooted. I heard my brother cry my name "Junko!" "Sister!" "Are you all right?"

That's when we saw everything had been flattened. There was nothing left.

Across the street was a neighbour's farm, where they grew vegetables. There had been a big cherry tree-that was now smashed. The farm had completely disappeared.

We could see Hiroshima on the horizon, which seemed to be on fire. Everywhere to the horizon were fires.

We were all worried about father. Then we saw him wheeling his bike through all the debris under the railway. His face was strange - a deep glowing red.

We realised later he'd been burnt. His face, hands, any part of him that was exposed was burnt, and so were the black parts of his clothes.

Father said we had to get away from the house. Even though we had no shoes, we had to flee.

We needed to get to the river.

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Junko's Story: Surviving Hiroshima's Atomic Bomb

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When I came to again, I was covered by debris. All I could see was a broken ceiling and through it, the grey sky. I assumed a bomb had fallen directly on our house. In my mind, I heard tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima screaming.

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Web-based Digital storytelling tools and online interactive resources 

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Web-based Digital storytelling tools and online interactive resources 

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School assignment to reinterpret the fairytale Little red ridning hood. Inspired by Röyksopps Remind me. Music: Slagsmålsklubben, Sponsored by destiny www.smk.just.nu Animation: Tomas Nilsson www.tomas-nilsson.se

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Stories bring us together, encourage us to understand and empathize, and help us to communicate. Long before paper and books were common and affordable, information passed from generation to generation through this oral tradition of storytelling. Consider Digital Storytelling as the 21st Century version of the age-old art of storytelling with a twist: digital tools now make it possible for anyone to create a story and share it with the world.

WHY Digital Storytelling?

Digital stories push students to become creators of content, rather than just consumers. Weaving together images, music, text, and voice, digital stories can be created in all content areas and at all grade levels while incorporating the 21st century skills of creating, communicating, and collaborating.

Movies, created over a century ago, represent the beginning of digital storytelling. Consuming movies has become a cultural phenomenon, but making them was inaccessible to the average person for decades. Film cameras, 8mm and even video cameras served as big breakthroughs, but editing posed a challenge until technology progressed with software, websites, and apps exploding on the scene and putting advanced editing skills into the hands of everyone. Look at the meteoric rise of YouTube and other video sharing websites. At no other time in history have we been able to create, edit and share video on both a personal and global scale. In fact, video and images have become primary ways of communicating, taking the place of traditional print literacies in some areas.

8 Steps to Great Digital Stories

Great digital stories:

Are personal

Begin with the story/script

Are concise

Use readily-available source materials

Include universal story elements

Involve collaboration at a variety of levels

In order to achieve this level of greatness, students need to work through a Digital Storytelling Process.

1. Start with an Idea

All stories begin with an idea, and digital stories are no different. This idea could be the topic of a lesson, a chapter heading in a textbook, or a question asked in class. Digital stories might be fiction or non-fiction. Once you or your student have an idea, make it concrete: write a proposal, craft a paragraph, draw a mind-map, or use any other pre-writing tool.

I once had 5th graders write their proposal on National Parks as a paragraph. The topic sentence was the park that they picked and its location. Then, they had to include three interesting facts about the park. Finally. the conclusion sentence had to explain why they picked that park or were excited to study it. In the process, we not only wrote the proposal but also improved our paragraph writing. One student commented, "I think I finally have this paragraph thing down."
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2. Research/Explore/Learn

Whether writing a fiction or nonfiction digital story, students need to research, explore or learn about the topic in order to create a base of information on which the story will be built. During this process, students learn both about validating information and information bias as they delve deeper into a topic.

At this stage, organization is very important. I often use mind-mapping to help students keep track of information. Outlines, index cards, and online note-taking tools all work as well. If students can organize their information digitally, then it makes the next steps much easier.
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3. Write/Script

When you are trying to write, there is nothing worse than a blank sheet of paper. That's why I strongly encourage the 2 pre-writing steps above. If students have a proposal, with a little bit of editing, it can become the introduction. If students research and explored a topic well, the body of the script should fall into place like a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are already there, students just need to make them fit.

This is also the time where literary decisions come into play. Ask students to determine whether they will use first, second or third person. Challenge them to expand word choices. Give them an opportunity to break out a dictionary or thesaurus. I once worked with high school social studies teachers who had the students write a full essay or research paper before turning it into a script. They told me that when they were done with the project, the students should be "experts" on the topic. It depends all on your goal and your students.
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4. Storyboard/Plan

Good stories start with a good script, but they don't end there. This is where we transition into visual media literacies. George Lucas once said, "If people aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read or write?" Storyboarding is the first step towards understanding sound and images. It is the plan or blueprint that will guide decision making about images, video and sound. Simple storyboards will just have room for images/video and the script. More advanced ones might even include room for transitions, and background music.
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5. Gather and Create Images, Audio and Video

This is the "stuff" that makes magic happen and writing come alive. Using their storyboard as a guide, students will gather - or create - images, audio and video. Everything they choose will impact and set the tone for their digital story. Introduce concepts such as visual hierarchy, tone, and illustration. This is also a great time to talk about Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons. Students should use this time to record themselves reading their scripts. I have often noticed that students rewrite their scripts as they record. Through this step in the process, they become acutely aware of mistakes and poor word choices.
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6. Put It All Together

This is where the magic happens - where students discover if their storyboard needs tweaking and if they have enough "stuff" to create their masterpiece. You will see students revisit and revise their storyboard. I love this stage. This is usually when students are so engrossed in their work that they don't leave when the bell rings, or they come back at lunch or after-school to work on the project. They will find ways to push the technology and tools beyond your expectations - blending images, creating unique transitions between video clips, incorporating music or sound effects. I also use this stage to provide students with a rubric so they understand what is necessary for a completed project as well as how to push themselves beyond the expectations.
Resources Rubrics
7. Share

Sharing online has become deeply embedded in our culture, so as educators, we might as well embrace it. Review your school or district's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and then look for a way to share your students' stories with a broader audience. Knowing that other people might see their work often raises student motivation to make it the best possible work that they can do.
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8. Reflection and Feedback

Too often in education, we do not teach or allow time for reflection and feedback. What did I learn? What do I know about myself that I did not know before? How can I do better next time?

Students need to be taught how to reflect on their own work and give feedback to others that is both constructive and valuable. Blogs, wikis discussion boards, and student response systems or polling tools can all be used to help students at this stage.
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Beyond Traditional Assessment

Schools across the country are embracing digital storytelling as an amazing tool for students to communicate their personal understanding of a topic. Digital stories create a bridge across content areas and provide opportunities for students to break free from print literacies to add deeper dimension to their work. It is critical that schools embraces digital storytelling and video creation as skills our students must learn in order to successfully communicate in the 21st century. This is a "Gutenberg" moment where communication and storytelling have changed so drastically that it "shakes-up" our cultural, social, and academic norms. Digital stories provide us with information that knowledge has been shared and understood. They allow us to ask our students: "What is the story? What is your story."

To learn more about Digital Storytelling, join us this Summer

Written by Samantha Morra

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8 Steps to Great Digital Storytelling - EdTechTeacher

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Tips and strategies for great digital storytelling. Find out how to use digital storytelling to creating amazing learning experiences for students.

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Disclosure: Storyboard That is currently an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.
From creating simple comic strips to planning long stories, Storyboard That is a tool that has a bunch of potential uses in the classroom. I recently put together a PDF of five projects that your students can complete with Storyboard That. The projects outlined include creative storytelling, retelling of history, using comics in videos, crafting book reviews with comics, and creating multimedia ebooks. In addition to directions for using Storyboard That, the following PDF includes screenshots with directions for using WeVideo and WidBook.

Click here to download Digital Storytelling With Comics.

On Wednesday, January 15th at 7pm EST I will be hosting a free webinar about this same topic. You can register for the webinar here. If you're interested in this topic but you cannot make the live session, please register anyway to have the recording emailed to you. The webinar is sponsored by Storyboard That, but will not be limited to only using Storyboard That.

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Free Ebook - Digital Storytelling With Comics

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Disclosure: Storyboard That is currently an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers. From creating simple comic strips to planning long stories, Storyboard That is a tool that has a bunch of potential uses in the classroom. I recently put together a PDF of five projects that your students can complete with Storyboard That.

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Recreation of classic stories as digital stories - $3.99 per story

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Are you encountering challenges getting your children to read? There is no denying the importance of regular reading habits to enhance, not only academic, but overall success. Help them discover the wonders of the written word by turning your own mobile device into an ally. Discover Immersive Reading: A new concept that encourages literacy skills and consequently mastery of the language.

Enrich Vocabulary

Increase Self-esteem

Stimulate intellectual and scientific curiosity

Increases Cultural Capital

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Are you encountering challenges getting your children to read? There is no denying the importance of regular reading habits to enhance, not only academic, but overall success. Help them discover the wonders of the written word by turning your own mobile device into an ally.

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Transmedia Storytelling: From Ideation to Campaign, it takes a village

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Transmedia Storytelling: From Ideation to Campaign, it takes a village

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Social Media today

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Recently someone asked how our best practices team at SAS approaches storytelling and my short answer was, " It takes a village." But that's only part of the story. It's a process we've developed within our team that drives rapid design of assets we use and reuse on multiple channels and within various campaigns.

To help show the process, I worked with our rich media producer to create an infographic that tells our story.

Media Ideation Design
This is where we start. The most unique thing we do is engage the design team upfront - for most this happens much later in the process. Taking this approach not only increases creative mindshare, it helps the designers plan. By default, this shortens a project's timeline (often significantly shorter).
Review
Once we've determined the audience and intended use, we select the media format. Something to consider is that a project may incorporate multiple media outputs. This post is a great example of that - I've written a blog post and worked with our rich media producer to create a supportive infographic to tell our story.
Editing
This is where the creative team takes over. The format determines the skillsets required and which designer to involve on the project. There are times when multiple designers will be required. As you can see in the infographic we have a few media formats that require specialized skills - we work within our wheelhouse which streamlines productivity and again shortens the timeline. If you don't have the skillset, partner with people within the organization who do.
Polish
Review is vital to the process and communicating with the SME(s) during design is important. It may take multiple rounds of review, but it's worth the time and effort in order to tell the right story.
Delivery
When you've been working on something for a long period of time, it's nice to have that second set of eyes - they catch the little things. It's also a good idea to have someone available to confirm that you've met corporate guidelines and standards.
Reporting
This is where we incorporate tweaks based on editorial and final SME review - we call it the final polish. Once the designer has incorporated the tweaks, it's ready for distribution.

Our team has two distribution channels, direct to vendor or SAS marketing for use within a campaign. During ideation we've determined which channel to use.

Not everything we design is incorporated into a campaign, but that doesn't mean we won't bake metrics into the project design. It just means the metrics will be limited. Be prepared to measure results, areas to tweak and what topics resonate for future campaigns.

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Transmedia Storytelling: From Ideation to Campaign, It Takes a Village [Infographic]

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Transmedia storytelling is a process that requires a team of people, specialized skillsets and a great communication plan. With the help of our rich media producer, I've created a fun infographic that shows how the SAS Best Practices team works together to tell our stories. It's our village.

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True stories drawn from life

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Stories drawn from research - we amplify academic research through engaging visual storytelling.

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A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (book)

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A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (book)

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Andrea Phillips

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Why You Need A Creator's Guide

If you want to attract, engage, and captivate your audience, you need this book. Written by an award-winning transmedia creator and renowned games designer, this book shows you how to utilize the same marketing tools used by heavy-hitters such as HBO, Disney, Ford, and Sony Pictures - at a fraction of the cost.

You'll learn how to:

Choose the right platforms for your story

Decide whether to DIY or outsource work

Find and keep a strong core production team

Make your audience a character in your story

Get the funding you need--and even make a profit

Forge your own successful transmedia career

With these proven media-ready strategies, you'll learn how to generate must-read content, must-see videos, and must-visit websites that will only grow bigger as viewers respond, contribute, and spread the word. You'll create major buzz with structures such as alternate reality games and fictional character sites - or even "old-fashioned" platforms such as email and phone calls. The more you connect to your audience and the more you get them involved in the storytelling process, the more successful you will be.

This isn't the future. This is now. This is how you tell your story, touch your audience, and take your game to the next level--through transmedia storytelling.

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A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling - Andrea Phillips

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If you want to attract, engage, and captivate your audience, you need this book. Written by an award-winning transmedia creator and renowned games designer, this book shows you how to utilize the same marketing tools used by heavy-hitters such as HBO, Disney, Ford, and Sony Pictures - at a fraction of the cost.

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An Australian Bushfire story

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Firestorm: The story of the bushfire at Dunalley

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What happened to the family that hid in the water? The Holmes family speak exclusively to the Guardian in a multimedia journey exploring what happened the day fire devastated their town

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The New York Times

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Photography and video by James Hill for the New York Times.

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An interactive media feature showing Hewlett-Packard’s new shipping corridor along the route of the ancient Silk Road.

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TED talk by Mike Matas

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Mike Matas: A next-generation digital book

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Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad -- with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is "Our Choice," Al Gore's sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth."

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Great Examples of Multiplatform storytelling

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Great Examples of Multiplatform storytelling

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Eco Stories

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Blog

It goes by many names: transmedia storytelling, transmedia narrative, cross-media seriality, and multiplatform storytelling.

But what exactly is 'it'? And why does it matter?

At ECHO, we most often use the term multiplatform storytelling to describe the general technique of telling a story using several formats and/or platforms, ideally with some involvement by audience or end users.

When a story first arises in the mind, it often comes with an idea of format. You'll sense, for example, when a story will best be told aloud, preferably in a group. Or when it needs to be expressed in writing, with attention to nuance. Or perhaps when it needs to be told on a big screen with plenty of explosions.

It's when you start to imagine other ways to express that story, or to make it even better, that you enter the realm of multiplatform storytelling. It's when you can envision additional tools and platforms bringing something else out in the story. It's when you can imagine all of those things contributing to layering the story.

Why Multiplatform Storytelling?

As humans, we tell stories at different times, usually to explain or illustrate something, to persuade someone and/or to amuse or entertain. It's how we make sense of the world and communicate our understanding to others. Our brains may be able to take in isolated facts and random events, but what we long to do, innately, is to tie things together. To connect the dots. To create cause and effect. To construct plot. We do this with story. Hearing stories and telling them is deeply satisfying, memorable and often moving.

We tell and consume stories across, and using, different platforms because we're curious little creatures. We wonder: how might that story look from a different perspective? From a different character's standpoint? What happened to the characters after the ending? How else might the story be told?

Technology affords us so many new options for extending a storyline, for customizing plot and character, for altering or presenting another visual look and feel that for many it can feel, well, disappointing to settle on a single unchanging narrative.

Examples of Multiplatform Storytelling

So where to find multiplatform storytelling? Thanks to social media and mobile technology, nearly everywhere. Below, we've highlighted a few places to begin your multiplatform studies.

The Biggies of Transmedia Entertainment

Some would (and do) argue that there are differences between a huge entertainment franchise, and 'pure' transmedia storytelling, but few would argue that The Matrix does not fit nicely into both camps. Why?

Scholar and transmedia storytelling guru Henry Jenkins chalks that up to dispersal. More simply, he says a transmedia story is one that tells the full story only as the sum of its parts. In a handout for a Transmedia Storytelling 101 course, Jenkins explains that "transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend The Matrix universe."

Other transmedia biggies that have done this well include - you guessed it - Star Trek, Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and the intertextually intertwined Marvel Universe.

Kids Entertainment: PBS Kids

The creators of kids TV have multiplatform storytelling down to an art. They have to: parents don't want their kids chained to the TV all day, but understand that their kids develop relationships with characters presented through TV series - and can learn from them (we'll thank Sesame Street for that one).

PBS Kids does educational (and entertaining) multiplatform storytelling for kids particularly well, treating the launch of any new series as an opportunity to reach kids - and more importantly, their concerned parents - in numerous ways, on numerous media. Peg + Cat, as one example, is a math-focused series for the preschool set, launched in 2013 with mobile and integrated online content - multiplatform now being the norm for any series launch. The series offers web-based games, learning tools, parental resources and a mobile app, all available at pbskids.org/peg.

Journalism Schools: J4462, Emerging Technologies at Missouri School of Journalism

As news organizations face the challenge of connecting with people like you and me who consume news very differently than our parents did (or than we ourselves did, five years ago), universities have helped to explore new ways of telling compelling many-platformed stories. This experiment, which explored multiplatform storytelling among six news organizations, was led by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, based on this hypothesis:
"Different content optimizes to different platforms at different points in a progressive storytelling process. For instance, slideshows, "Five Things to Know," and other short, easy-to-consume elements resonate on mobile phones. But because mobile has varying screen sizes and optimization opportunities, video clips and data visualization might resonate better on a tablet."
Publishing: WIRED Magazine

Every magazine and newspaper editor and publisher on the planet, at one point or another, has likely asked themselves how (and/or whether) to best utilize digital media to better (and more profitably) serve readers and advertisers. In a quest to do, editors and digital media specialists have been gathering for nearly a decade now to plan multimedia content that rivals the effect of the New York Times' famous Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, or at least to offer a different, platform-specific presentation of content for their different platforms (a long-form article in the magazine, say, with a photo slideshow online and/or a video or audio interview for the iPad edition).

Even in the early days, Scott Dadich, WIRED's editor in chief, says he "quickly saw how print and online content can be adapted to take advantage of each platform's strengths," and sees a very real possibility for a publishing ecosystem where different platforms support one another effectively. Hear, hear. He spoke recently at The Future of Storytelling conference; this video offers a summary of his vision for powerful multiplatform storytelling for magazine titles and well beyond.

Intelligent Activism: Bear 71

A wonderful example of multiplatform storytelling intended to educate and inspire action, the National Film Board of Canada's explores the ways people, nature and technology interact, using an interactive social narrative and a variety of platforms. It was launched at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival New Frontier program, allowing the audience to engage with a female grizzly bear (that was watched throughout her life via trail cameras in Banff National park) through a series of webcams, social media channels, a microsite, augmented reality and more. The result was a piece of environmental reporting that felt very human, and very close.

Marketing and Advertising Campaigns: Airbnb

Airbnb is a master at content marketing, and at telling stories that get to the heart of why people want to connect. It's not surprising, then, that the company's Wall and Chain story was shortlisted for Best Multiplatform Campaign in the 2014 Shorty Awards. The story was targeted at "inspiring belonging and celebrating a united Germany through the magical true story of an Airbnb host and guest on the 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall."

Airbnb created an animated film to bring the story to life, as well as at the same time conducting an economic impact study on Berlin to showcase thow Airbnb travellers support the local economy and make a difference to the city as a whole - communicating all of this through an immersive digital experience. They supplemented this with long-form written articles, updates via social media channels, behind-the-scenes videos showcasing the real family behind the animated film and hosting a unification event "that paid homage to the roots of Berlin history and culture through the feature of a Berlin Wall build out." The campaign in total earned more than 8 million views across social and digital with 130 press hits in 15 countries.

What It's All About

Telling rich, interconnected stories may sound complex, and a little daunting. It doesn't have to be. It's still all about communicating, connecting, amusing and hopefully understanding one another - using the tools and means of expression that make the most sense for your purpose.
Do you want to mark your company's anniversary in a meaningful way? Wondering how to share your organization's rich heritage in a way that truly resonates with your employees or customers? We can't wait to hear from you. Drop us a line at hello@echostories.com or call us at 604-261-1858.

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Great Examples of Multiplatform Storytelling - Echo Storytelling Agency

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It goes by many names: transmedia storytelling, transmedia narrative, cross-media seriality, and multiplatform storytelling. But what exactly is 'it'? And why does it matter? At ECHO, we most often use the term multiplatform storytelling to describe the general technique of telling a story using several formats and/or platforms, ideally with some involvement by audience or end [...]

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Snow Fall - The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

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Snow Fall - The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

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The New York Times

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Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

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Fresh powder beckoned 16 expert skiers and snowboarders into the backcountry. Then the snow gave way.

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Bringing Stories to Life

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A support page for the presentation Digital Storytelling meets the CCSS

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You searched for digital storytelling - Educators Technology

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