Aberth Digital Storytelling

Here’s more about how we worked with people who had stories to tell about what the heritage of the Rhondda Valleys in Wales  means to them in Valleys Kids’ Rhondda Lives project. This post follows a question from Cheryl Colan:
“…Did the individual storytellers work with and direct the video editor? If they spent only 2 […]

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This is where the digital stories will be made.  There needs to be enough space, tables, chairs to accommodate all the equipment and people. Power points along two sides of the room makes safe rigging easier. It’s good if it has natural light and ventilation but’s essential it can be made dark enough for images […]

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1. Make sure each digital storyteller in the workshop watches their film from start to finish
2. Make sure there are no mistakes with narration or images: an image duplicated or in the wrong place, a piece of narration clashing with an image
3. Correct any typos in the titles or credits
4. Double-check the spelling of names
Here’s […]

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When adding titles and end credits to your digital story, use only the middle 80% of the screen. The central area is the TV safe area. If you creep too far out to the edges, there’s a risk letters will get lost if the story’s broadcast on TV. Old cathode-ray tube TVs trim the edges […]

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Here’s a tip that will make post-production, storing, archiving and finding individual digital stories easier.
When working with workshop participants and individuals, ask them to make a final decision about which name they will use on their digital story.
This seems so simple, but some people find it difficult because:

they have a name like John Smith which […]

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If you work in a museum, library or archive and you’re looking for digital storytelling inspiration, here are links to three ideas in this blog:
Archive Meets Storytelling - A step-by-step set of instructions on how to run a workshop which delivers short videos mixing considered but unscripted personal reminiscence with existing archive footage.

What a Museum […]

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Here’s an example from Stockholm of a visual narrative (no voice) made by editing together five very short clips. With this previous post in mind, it’s just good to see experiments like this.
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Here are the latest details about the fourth annual festival of digital storytelling in Aberystwyth, Wales, on Wednesday 17 June 2009, from a press release from Aberystwyth Arts Centre:
Following on from the success of DS3 the fourth festival of Digital Storytelling DS4 aims to inspire and encourage and show the exciting possibilities of Digital Storytelling […]

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1. move away from the ‘once in a lifetime experience’ approach. Make it feel like a process that can become more of a ‘routine’ than a ‘treat’ event.
2. get people making stories using accessible tools. E.g. free web-based editing tools they’ll be able to continue using after you’ve moved on.
3.reduce the resources participants need to […]

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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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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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This is a new term I just had to invent. We launched a new Welsh-language mobile website yesterday (info). It was fast as anything when I browsed it alone, yet when I needed to show it to Siwan from the press office, it loaded ever so slowly. Why did this happen? Because of pink fingertip […]

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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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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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