Aberth Digital Storytelling

Digital Stories available to watch again on BBC iPlayer until the middle of next week:
“To celebrate National Older People’s Day and to change some outdated stereotypes on ageing, a collection of short stories written, recorded, edited and produced by people living in Wales.”
This is a link for people reading this in the UK only, sorry, […]

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The European Digital Storytelling Network is now active and it looks as if the Copenhagen workshops have been going really well. Good luck to this new organisation.
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Anyone who filmed home video from the 1980s -90s will is likely to have that footage in the VHS tape medium. I’ve just seen an item on a TV programme called Sunday Life which warned that fungus is attacking these old tapes. So now may be a good time to digitise these old recordings.
The way […]

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Publishing on YouTube is cheap, quick, easy and not without its dangers. So here’s how to avoid the pain.
If it’s your own content you’re publishing and this is what you want to do, go for it. If you’re part of a digital storytelling project that helps others to make stories and you’re looking for a […]

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This is your story, so try to use your own images, story, words, original sentiments, music, style, philosophy, etc. as far as you can.
The promotion of royalty-free content advocated by some digital storytelling trainers means that opportunities may be missed. Of course, sometimes you’ll find yourself working with people who have no access to their […]

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“How can people participate without  necessarily having to be centre stage?” That’s a question I’ve been asking myself ever since discussing digital storytelling with a colleague, Grahame Davies, last year.
My experience of Digital Stories is that they’re usually personal. This aspect of ‘talking about myself’ raises a barrier in some people and cultures. This was […]

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It’s the week of the National Eisteddfod which is back here in Cardiff for the first time in 30 years. Lots of buzz on the Maes. I met Gwion Llwyd of Sbarc! yesterday while watching Mr Huw play live. Sbarc! is a successful Digital Storytelling project based in Caernarfon, run by Rhian Cadwaladr. Gwion […]

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Of the stories I’ve seen which use poems I can remember only one or two as being the best possible way of telling that person’s story. This is just my personal opinion.
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If the story goes something like this:
“When he came back from the mine he had a bath”
weaker: cut from a photo of the mine to a photo of a tin bath
stronger: leave up the photo of dad throughout, maybe with a slow zoom in.
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E.g. the question mark. If you’ve got a line in your story like: “why did he do this?”, don’t put a great big image of a question mark on the timeline/screen.
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Get your voice-recording done with a high-quality unit in a quiet room with natural acousics (neither boxy nor echoey), unless there’s an overriding reason to the contrary (e.g. you’re working with an archive recording or in an inescapably noisy environment). As I’ve said here before, the best digital stories can work as radio pieces, so […]

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Simon Collinge has been a pioneer and a champion of Digital Storytelling in Wales for the past seven years and he’s leaving Yale College Wrexham this week to go freelance.
Sometimes, when you’re setting something new up, you need someone high up who ‘gets’ it, who says ‘yes’ and covers your back when change threatens your […]

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Cuts or cross-fades are the video transitions I recommend, unless there’s a good story-related reason to use something else.
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E.g. it’s tempting to tell the story of a trip chronologically thus
weaker: “We started in Rome, took the train to Florence where we saw Ponte Vecchio, then we headed to the coast towards Pisa….”
stronger: look at how well Simon Griffiths uses the device of how he funded his south American trip to make a great […]

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Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling has written with news of workshops he’s holding in Copenhagen this summer and of exciting plans to establish a European Center for Digital in conjunction with Copehagen Business School.
Joe’s team will be joined for the workshops by guest trainers Lisa Heledd Jones (BBC Wales and George […]

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Which personal storytelling forms work well with the volume turned down?
This question’s inspired by opportunities presented by ‘A Wall is a Screen‘, kiosks in public places and public shopping-street screens like the one in Cardiff city centre, pictured by Mooganic.
If you know of ’silent’ short-form’ visual personal storytelling forms that passers-by find engaging enough […]

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Hyperaction launches Storywalks tomorrow morning with a walk and picnic in Torfaen, south Wales. On their website you can download a printable PDF routemap (here’s an example) and free mp3 podcasts of the stories to listen to along your way.
Loading up your portable device with stories and heading off to the countryside clutching a map […]

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I’ve always been puzzled this paradox:  people get so many new skills by making their first digital story …. yet most people only ever produce one digital story. It was  Jenny Kidd, whose PhD subject was Digital Storytelling at the BBC, who drew my attention to this.
The team at University of Glamorgan has been […]

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Dear friend of [murmur],
Shawn Micallef sent me an email this morning saying that [murmur] is looking to hire an executive director to help move the project forward. He asked recipients of the mail to pass it on, so here it is:
“[murmur] is looking for an inspirational leader.  We’re seeking someone passionate about community, cities, […]

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I’ve just returned from the DS3 Festival of Digital Storytelling at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. It was another successful festival, following on from and expanding on last year’s DS2. People had travelled from all over Wales and Britain. I met delegates from Belfast, USA and there was someone who’d come from New Zealand too.
Day1 - Thursday […]

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I met Culturenet Cymru’s Sioned Rhys Jones and Hawys Tomos at Eisteddfod yr Urdd, Conwy, last week. As part of the National Library of Wales and funded by Heritage Lottery and Welsh Assembly Government, Culturenet Cymru is working on a project based in Aberystwyth called ‘From Warfare to Welfare’. There’re doing three things:
1. helping people […]

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I’ve been corresponding recently with Wim Kievits who’s had an interest in Digital Storytelling for some time. He recently contacted me regarding a presentation he’s making in the Netherlands later this week. He asked what triggered BBC Wales’s interest in starting Capture Wales and asked: “Can you tell me or point out to me how […]

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Registration is now open for Wales’s third annual Festival of Digital Storytelling at Aberystwyth Arts Centre on Thursday 5th and Friday 6 June 2008. And - wearing my DS Cymru member hat - I’d like to invite you to come
Yes, DS3 has expanded to two days this year and, as it says on […]

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Tori James, the first Welsh woman and youngest British woman ever to climb Everest shot a half-hour TV documentary using the kinds of devices anyone can buy in the High St.

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There’s an enigma around technology, isn’t there?  Take the mobile phone for example. We used to use just it to make phonecalls; now phones have near-broadcast-quality video cameras on board too. If only there was a way of releasing some more of the potential of technology for the benefit of society…
 Let me start with some […]

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When you’re working on storytelling with a group of people in a situation like the Digital Storytelling Storycircle, there’s one game that often really helps people to come up with ‘their story’. It’s the Match Game and it’s Gilly Adams who pioneered its use in Digital Storytelling. Gilly wrote instructions for this game to be […]

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That’s the title for a 30-minute documentary TV programme my colleague Melanie Lindsell has made with young Welsh climber Tori James about her attempt to climb Everest. The programme goes out on BBC Wales on 6 May (see below)
Melanie’s an experienced Video Nation producer and she’s also had success with longer-form documentaries using the self-authored […]

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Back in 2003, BBC Wales organised an International Digital Storytelling Conference. Two of the many attendees travelled to Cardiff all the way from Japan to be with us:
1. Akiko Ogawa, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Studies on Contemporary Society at Aichi Shukutoko University and
2. Aske Dam a Norwegian participatory media specialist who has worked […]

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It’s by the BBC Capture Wales team and we wrote it to coincide with the Digital Storytelling Gathering tour around Wales last month. It’s on the BBC Wales Digital Storytelling website. Hope you find it useful.
Here’s a link to the html menu page on the BBC website. And here’s a link to the pdf download […]

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The Capture Wales team has been holding a series of five Digital Storytelling Gatherings around Wales. We’ve held them in Caernarfon, Aberystwyth, Swansea, Merthyr Tydfil and Cardiff. The final one - in Cardiff - was held today and it was fantastic!
More than 100 individuals who are actively involved in or interested  in facilitating digital storytelling […]

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Sensecam - tasks to test what it feels like to walk around all day with a device around your neck that captures automatic pictures every minute or less…

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Watching this home video set me wondering about what Dylan might need to do to get what he’d shot at home out on TV.

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I’m hoping this is useful to people working in museums or with film archives….
I’ve written about Rhondda Lives! here before. This is a Valleys Kids Project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, BBC Wales and the National Sound and Screen Archive of Wales.
I led a workshop held at Valleys Kids’ Soar Chapel at the end […]

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Step 1: make your own a 60-second movie, based on the theme ‘unite’.
Step2: register and enter.
Step 3: there’s no Step 3.
P.S. here’s the film that won last year’s BAFTA. There’s a Wales category and winner too.
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The end-of-workshops screening - along with the storycircle - is everyone’s favourite part of the workshop. This afternoon at two at Valleys Kids, Soar Chapel, Penygraig, Rhondda, we’re holding the Rhondda Lives! screening and I’m really looking forward to it.
This week has been a fantastic one with ten people making a personal film […]

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Hamish Fyfe: ‘I remember being in a classroom in Northern Ireland where the children were drawing. I noticed one little girl of about seven and asked her what she was drawing. “I’m doing a drawing of God” she said. I said I thought that was interesting since a lot of people didn’t really know what […]

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When I lived in Ardfert, County Kerry, in the Republic of Ireland in the mid 90s, I remember a radio programme called ‘Queueing For A Living’ in which the presenter Paddy O’Gorman sought out queues of all kinds and recorded conversations he had with those waiting. From laundrettes to prison waiting rooms, there was something […]

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University of Leeds is advertising two fully-paid PhD scholarships, one of which will be about “Digital storytelling and political engagement”. I studied media management with this university’s Institute of Communications Studies and it’s a great department and a fabulous place to study and live. (Link to application from on right-hand side of this page.)
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I had an interesting day at the Media Literacy Task Force’s Digital Media Literacy Summit at Channel 4 in London yesterday.
“Right now there are more than 300 million people around the world watching video content online. It’s a fundamental shift that completely democratises our business.” Peter Chernin, News Corp. (Jon Gisby’s slide; I think this […]

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If you’re starting out in digital storytelling, you face  some fundamental decisions that will determine or be determined by equipment and software you have access to. I’m not going to give many answers today, but I’ll come back to these in future. It’s just useful to be aware of the scope…
What kind of computer am […]

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Here are three links I wanted to share with you in the area of storytelling, participation and citizenship:
1. http://www.friction.tv/
If you’ve got a webcam and a microphone plugged into your computer, you can contribute to this site. It partners with Channel 5 news and is a managable way to get your point across on video. The […]

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I gave a brief presentation about digital storytelling in Wales on behalf of BBC Wales as part of last night’s RTS Wales Media Literacy Network event at the University of Glamorgan’s new Atrium building in Cardiff. DK of Mediasnackers blogged the session here.
I wanted to show a digital story called Set Free by Dean […]

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Here are some public H&S considerations for digital storytelling workshop organisers. I hope they prove useful.
Venue
- nearby parking and public transport
- accessibility for wheelchairs with no trip hazards
- accessible toilets and break-out spaces
- enough space, tables, chairs to accommodate all the equipment and people and to allow facilitators to move comfortably between participants
- power points […]

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The first of BBC Scotland’s Highland Lives videos and audio slideshows are now live at http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/highlandlives/.
I watched two videos - To Catch a Lobster and Love to Grow. They were mainly video with some still images. They had some really rare moments and certainly revealed something special about the authors and their lives. Having the […]

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I’ve just updated my shopping list here:
brand new Aberth Digital Storytelling Resources
It’s actually the first page of a brand new sister website to this blog. Aberth Digital Storytelling Resources is a response to what a number of people have asked for: a site that brings together in one place all kinds of equipment and software […]

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I bumped into Sue Williams of Hyperaction at an Adobe event in Cardiff last week. It was nice to catch up with her and hear about some very exciting plans Hyperaction are making. They’ve just put out a call for freelancers in the south Wales area which I’m pasting here in the hope it’ll be […]

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I’ve changed this site so you can now add your comments to any post. You do this either at the bottom of the post’s own page or by clicking on the word ‘comments’ or ‘no comments’ at the end of the item on the homepage. I’m hoping the anti-spam device works and I’ll keep an […]

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Wow, I’ve just been reading about the Singapore International Storytelling Festival that’s going on this week. 60,000 storytellers are expected to attend. I’m struggling to imagine that many people all coming together for a storytelling festival. Fantastic!
Digital storytelling is on the programme this year and Denise Atchley is taking part. I’ll never forget Denise’s speech […]

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We looked at workshop space in the last post, today it’s the kit.
You want to bid for funding to set up a digital storytelling project, but you’re not sure what you’re going to need? Here’s a list to build from of examples of equipment needed to run digital storytelling and participatory media workshops. The kit […]

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If you’re planning to set up your own digital storytelling or participatory media project,
you’ll need somewhere to hold your workshops. You can base yourself at one venue or roam around using existing community facilities as venues. Here’s a solution which has the capacity to combine the two scenarios. If you’re making a bid for funding, […]

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Following on from yesterday’s roundup, here’s the final batch of links, for now…
400+ Tools for Photographers, Videobloggers, Podcasters and Musicians.
50 storytelling tools on the web.
Page of links to DS resources.
Online video editing tool.
Digital Stories Swansea stories, and some more from Swansea on YouTube.
Cyfle Animation Scheme students’ animated digital stories.
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I had an email this morning from a student at Albany, NY, USA, who’s making a digital story for a college assignment. He was writing to ask about online tutorials. Here are three that came to mind:
1. www.photobus.co.uk > DS > DS Tutorial. Daniel Meadows goes into the software and the key steps to building […]

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You’ve been invited to help a group of digital storytellers to post produce their stories at the end of their workshop or course. Here are some things to think about when you prepare.
1. know your ‘deliverables’. Have a list of things you need to take away from the digilab and make sure you go home […]

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Some people who make a digital story telling report that telling and sharing their story helped make them feel better. The word ‘catharsis‘ is used in evaluation quite often. Digital storytelling is also being used in the field of dementia; Ysbyty Tri Chwm in south Wales leads the field in this, as far as […]

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/carwyn/sets/72157600481700817/
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Here’s a link to a Flickr gallery of pictures taken at the DS2 Digital Storytelling festival by Swansea-based digital storyteller, Tyron Francis:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tfrancis/sets/72157600422926983/
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I’ve been at the DS2 Digital Storytelling festival in Aberystwyth for the past three days and it’s been great!
On Tuesday and Wednesday, my colleagues Huw Davies, Lisa Heledd and Carwyn Evans ran a Mobile Phone Storytelling workshop. I went to the final screening and the stories were very good. These three people, along with Gilly […]

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Ever saved something from a Mac to a pendrive, then put that same pendrive into a PC? Notice all those annoying ‘hidden’ Mac system files cluttering up the drive? If you right-click on the drive in Windows Explorer and search for the following:
FINDER.DAT,___Move&Rename,DESKTO~1,OPENFO~1,TheVolumeSettingsFolder,Desktop*,.Trashes,.DS_Store
Check, then delete them. Bingo!
By the way, I think you get a similar […]

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I’ve just been looking at the new Highland Lives website. The Flash video tutorials look really good and there’ll be an uploader there soon. Editor Liz Leonard is coming to Aberystwyth for DS2.
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Dr. Jason Ohler, University of Alaska (www.jasonohler.com) wrote to me today to let me know about his… “…new web journal, subTechst (like subtext, just more digitally inclined); it’s low impact (a few short postings a month), and is about technology and learning, with an emphasis on my work in new media and digital storytelling. Right […]

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As well as being one of the BBC Wales digital storytelling team, I’m a member of a national umbrella organisation for digital storytellers in Wales: DS Cymru.DS Cymru and Aberystwyth Arts Centre are organising our second annual festival, DS2, in Aberystwyth, mid Wales, on 21 June 2007
Speakers include:
Daniel Meadows - http://www.photobus.co.uk
Shawn Micallef - http://murmurtoronto.ca/
John Freyer […]

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Here’s a link to a new digital storytelling manual by KQED:
http://dsi.kqed.org/index.php/workshops/about/C66
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A tribute to my late grandfather, John Emrys Williams of Glan Conwy, Wales, who served on board HMS Diadem during World War II. This is a Digital Story I made at a BBC training the trainers workshop led by Daniel Meadows in April 2002.

Click to play
play_blip_movie_168751();
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Done it! I’ve managed to use the Nokia N93 to capture, record and publish video which is good enough for broadcast on TV as well as the web. OK, what I’ve made is only ten seconds long, to work around ShoZu’s 4MB upload limit, but it worked.
Here’s the clip on YouTube and here it is […]

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The three production phases on mobile are:
1. capture
easiest of the three, but the author needs to decide which forms to adopt
2. edit
(a) on the phone, limited scope but it’s possible to mark ins and outs on clips and assemble them on the phone.
(b) on computer. Technical issues include formats, conversion, standards, etc.
3. publication
(a) ftp via […]

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I had an interesting day in VideoForum 2007 at London’s Earl Court on Tuesday. Here are three products/newsbytes that may be of interest to digital storytellers:
1. Edirol R09 portable audio recorder looks ace. When I chose the M-Audio Microtrack, Edirol’s products could only capture audio at 44.1k and I needed 48k, because this is the […]

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Here’s a chart comparing the features of ten browser-based online image editors: Snipshot, PXN8, VicImager, Picture2Life, Cellsea, Phixr, NetImager, Image
Author, nexImage and LookWow:
http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/online-image-editors.html
The most useful feature on my wishlist is ‘crop to target size’ and it’s unfortunately not one of the features compared here.
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I’ve been following the Ndiyo story for some months now. It’s a way that many people can share just one computer and one internet connection by using Linux’s multiple-users capability and a ‘magic box’ plugged into the ethernet connection. Then, each user needs only a keyboard, mouse and screen. The single internet connection can be […]

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This is a checklist for someone who’s been asked to train people at a centre to make a digital story and to leave some skills behind so people at that centre can continue to make stories after the initial trainer’s moved on…
I wouldn’t expect every machine at most centres in this country to be capable […]

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If you’re planning to train people to include video clips in the form of ‘pieces to camera’ in their digital story or ’short’, there’s a lot people need to learn:
- how to feel comfortable and come across as well as they can on camera
- how to say something that’s engaging for the viewer
- how to […]

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Someone asked me this week about setting up and training people to run audio storytelling workshops on someone else’s equipment. It’s best to be prepared for the unexpected. The biggest challenge is often the fact that machines are ‘locked down’ by the administrator.
To work around potential permissions issues when working on computers in community cyber […]

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File and folder housekeeping is really important when it comes to building, re-building and archiving your Digital Story movie-file and associated assets. It’s worth emphasising this. Devise a way of working whereby all the components of the Digital Story fit in named sub-folders of one master folder which has the storyteller’s full name on it. […]

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When helping others to make their first Digital Story, you may work with people who’ve never used a computer before. Here’s a checklist of ten of the first things you need to know about if you’re unfamiliar with computers:
1. How to switch your computer on and off.
2. How to sit comfortably; tilt the screen to […]

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Presentation at Streaming Media Europe 2006 about Managing Digital Assets, taking Digital Storytelling as a case study, by Gareth Morlais - BBC Wales Digital Storytelling.
Digital Stories are two minute personal films created by the storyteller, using their own photos words and voice.
Slide 1 - The Any List
Rights management becomes easier if you brief authors before […]

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I’m speaking in London on Friday and the subject of the session is Managing Digital Assets, taking Digital Storytelling as a case study. A new concept I’ll be introducing is that of Dream Deliverables. I won’t say too much before the event, but here’s a link to two of the presentation’s key slides.
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Today, we’re still in the first phase of broadcasting in Britain: Mass Media 1.0, where the content agenda is being firmly ruled by the broadcasters. Currently, broadcasters’ portfolios are being drawn up by too few people and audiences are not yet getting a diverse and surprising enough portrayal of life on their TV screens. What […]

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