ABSTRACT
We are in an age of media transition in which the textual is increasingly integrated with other semiotic modes and old and new media interact in a complex relationship. This chapter examines the evolving technology of whiteboard animation as a relatively new digitally mediated multimodal storytelling form that exemplifies the complexity of the convergence between old and new media. Some whiteboard animation videos rely on the material practices of drawing and photography, whereas others mimic the material, using digital animation software and video to generate a story. The most common elements of whiteboard animation are the visualisation of a whiteboard as the canvas, the illustrator’s hand in the field of view and a marker drawing out the story. In the last decade, do-it-yourself (DIY) software programmes have emerged allowing ordinary people to tell their stories through whiteboard animation using libraries that include pre-drawn characters, stock images, music, drawing implements and hands. Whiteboard animation is a multimodal storytelling form that is increasingly used to educate, inform, advertise and entertain.
This chapter investigates the little-studied form of whiteboard animation to uncover the persuasive power of digital storytelling and reveal how technological transformations can inform storytelling practices. To develop frameworks for understanding the affordances that digital technologies bring to stories, this research explores narrativity and narrative discourse as social, rhetorical and multimodal. Through the lens of multimodality and rhetorical narratology, setting, time, point of view and voice are analysed in commercial and DIY whiteboard animation examples, paying attention to material practices of production and multimodal narrative development, as well as the complex relationship between speaker, audience, message and medium. This research on whiteboard animation looks to understand the intersection between technology and storytelling and contributes to digital humanities scholarship that looks to understand the implications of technology, writing and narrative.
