DIGITAL TRANSCREATION OF SHORT STORIES

Nowadays, with the proliferation of video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo, short videos have become a priority for education. Even the smallest and most distant schools want to include videos as part of their innovative approaches for community engagement. In this context, there is a growing demand for educators who may, for themselves, effectively create content in the digital format. Motion graphics explainer videos have become a popular alternative due to the variety of the so called do-it-yourself video makers now available in the market, most of them allowing easy composition with 2D and 3D animations. In this paper we focus on the creative rewriting and video editing of the content of two famous short stories: “the invention of the orange”, from Fernando Sabino; and “the dinosaur”, from Augusto Monterroso. We name the effort a transcreation, a term used by advertising and marketing professionals when referring to the process of adapting a message to a new mode of expression (with an emphasis on the images able to ensure its adequacy to a particular audience), while maintaining the same emotional and epistemological implications as it does in the original one. Two animated videos produced by the authors to introduce issues about innovation and information technology are presented and discussed in terms of those possible challenges a short story poses for the audio-visual transcreation. We argue that the minimal grammar structure usually used in explainer video stories is not sufficient for a short story transcreation, and suggest that some cinematic and literary aspects related to the dramatization and reversal features of the stories are essential to make them successful.