Inspired by the absolutely brilliant job that Kati is doing for my project GEO-Tag der Natur, I have recently started experimenting with “Insta stories” on the topic of wave watching.

Insta stories, for those who aren’t familiar with them, are a special type of post on Instagram that only stays visible for 24 hours (unless you save them as highlight, in which case they can be watched until you decide to delete them). They are usually used to give quick glimpses into what’s going on that day, and can be anything from random snap- or screen shots to elaborate stories. The latter is what Kati has been doing for GEO-Tag der Natur — she tells cute and engaging short stories about different topics, using photos and video clips, which she combines with fun gifs to make them even cuter (if you have an Instagram account you can watch them in the highlights of our account).

So that’s what I have been trying to do, too.

My first attempt is posted below — except that what I post below doesn’t contain the links and gifs and stuff, because it turns out that while you can export stories from Instagram, I couldn’t convert them into a format that my blog or vimeo would accept and still keep the gimmicks (original version here). But I still like the format of telling a story. What do you think?

https://vimeo.com/341862851

The feedback I got on that story was super positive, so I decided to do it again.

Since my second Insta story contained so many cute gimmicks, I didn’t even attempt to export it, but wrote a separate blog post using the same videos and pictures (But you can watch the story — including the cute gimmicks! — here).

(And then, when writing this blog post, I realized that if I did a screencast, I could that then convert into something my blog accepts. Duh! So below you can watch my story the way I see it when logged into my account — including how many people watched it and all the buttons that I could click to edit and exit etc.. In the future I should probably just do the screencast from a different account to give you a cleaner view…)

By this point, it started bugging me that I was putting effort into Insta stories but that I didn’t have a good way to use them on my own blog (remember, I hadn’t come up with the screencast idea yet). I like having full control over hosting the stuff I don’t want to disappear, and I don’t like telling the same story twice for different platforms (although I realize that customizing stories for each platform and thus audience is always good advice).

So the next story didn’t use fancy gimmicks (except on the last slide), and I could export the pictures and combine them into the .gif you see below.

Mmmmh, I like that!

Except now I am thinking I should still do an English gif for my blog and keep the German one to my Instagram. Which, again, feels like a lot of work for something that I want to do in random pockets of time like on my commute, not as a real task. So my next story was a language-free one:

So in the end it turns out that classical gifs work quite well for transporting my stories. Not nearly as cute as they could be, but maybe that’s ok?

What do you think? What style of Insta story would you like to see more of?

Option A: Give me cute little gimmicks like ducks on surfboards and ladies jumping into pools!

Option B: GIFs work well and I don’t need all the cutesy gimmicks

Option C: Other. Please elaborate! :-)