Harry Marks: Well, the metaphor is like putting a show together, that you have a bunch of five by seven cards that you put on the cork board. The random order mechanism in those presentation programs makes things fabulous. What I really hate are the tools that totally mess up the user experience by offering them completely over-the-top graphic tricks. If you don't have a story, no amount of graphic trickery will make it interesting

Interviewer: Yeah, that's my experience with a number of these tools. In a funny way, I found it easier to teach Premiere. The new version 5.0 seems to be a bit more difficult, it seems oriented to people that worked in the offline analog video editing world.

Harry Marks: Well, I did live in that world. And I was at home with it. But I was much more at home with the old Premiere because it made so much sense to me in terms of how you order things. That's why I thought that Premiere was great for your classes. But it demands a lot from people that don't get it. I am interested in taking one of the pieces you created in Premiere and running it through a Presentation program.

Interviewer: What are some of the other tools you are excited about?

Harry Marks: There's a lot of software out that's allowing you to do many of the features that are most powerful in Premiere, like image panning. There is a product called IPIX from Interactive Pictures here you take two pictures, and those two pictures stitch themselves together into a 360 degree sphere.

Interviewer: So, it's like a super wide angle lens

Harry Marks: It actually shoots a little bit behind you. To tell a story, you could take the camera down the set of a television drama, and take this spherical, navigable picture. As you navigated around the cast, you could click on a specific actor and hear either his own story, or his character's story. It's a fascinatingly immersive way of telling a story with one picture

There is also a tool called Proview that I've been evangelizing since their first beta. It's a wonderful iconic presentation tool that allows you to create a presentation in minutes. Another that I've recently tried is called Slides & Sounds from InMedia in Canada that looks very promising. Plus it's less than 50 dollars which is a help. Both of these programs claim to be able to turn their presentations into web pages at the touch of a button. If that's true, we may be on our way to Digital storytelling for the rest of us.

Interviewer: You have been interested in the ways that later life generations are approaching Digital Storytelling. Are there some specific issues you are hoping to address?

Harry Marks: Well, as you know, I was an advisor to the launch of ThirdAge.com, the website dedicated to serving the senior community that grew out of SeniorNet. It's a commercial website, a difficult thing to keep alive, but the idea has enormous merit. It's founder, Mary Furlong, is absolutely dedicated to opening up the lines of communication for seniors, and seniors have lots of stories to tell. So may times I've seen people who have been reborn by the ability to emote, to tell their stories, to find out that somebody is interested in what they have to say. There was one man who was a World War II Army Air Force flyer who found out from some twelve year olds how fascinated and interested they were in the experiences he's had You think that you're out of it, and the Web tells you that you're not, and you're not alone. Whatever you think, or whatever you feel, you're not alone because you've got 30 million people out there -.

Interviewer: -that could conceivably tap into your story.

Harry Marks: Exactly. I think I read a statistic that 80% of home computer use is chatting. That's a very significant number. Of course there's a lot of bad chat, a certain amount of dangerous chat, but there's a whole lot of good stuff as well. If you visit ThirdAge.com, go into the area called portraits. You can see the people telling their own stories, and they're fascinating.

Interviewer: How are you looking to continue your examination of storytelling?