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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Avoid visual cliches – number 4 of 7 DS no-nos
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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Avoid less-than-perfect voice recordings – number 3 of 7 DS no-nos
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 aim for top radio quality when you record. Written and first published by Gareth Morlais on 18 July 2008.
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Simon Collinge
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 very existence. That’s what Simon’s been so good at doing in Wrexham. He’s recruited some top Digital Storytelling facilitators and supported their growth and the growth of their project to the impressive point where the Yale Centre for Digital Storytelling is today. I can’t make it to the farewell party tomorrow but I know…
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Avoid fancy video effects – number 2 of 7 DS no-nos
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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Avoid pure linear reportage – number 1 of 7 DS no-nos
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 story even better.
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From Copenhagen to Wrexham via Jamaica
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 Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling) and Barrie Stephenson of digistories.co.uk. There are details of the workshops here. Next: knife crime is a problem in some British cities. I think community leaders may take inspiration from Mervin Jarman’s story. He’s just been awarded the Stockholm Challenge Trophy. He’s set up a digilab where people can come…