Publishing your digital story 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 way of getting their stories out there, just be aware the embed code that’s on offer enables anyone to embed that video into a completely different website. Usually that will be someone’s on-topic blog; sometime though, the final destination is something much less desirable. It’s all about context, isn’t it? Benefits…
-
-
Avoid using other people’s stuff – number 7 of 7 DS no-nos
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 own materials. And teachers in class with young children may also find it easier to use images from the internet. If you do use your own personal materials though, you’ll not only avoid issues around intellectual property, but your story will also truly be your own. Written and first published by Gareth Morlais on…
-
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.
-
Stories that work with the sound turned off
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 to stop and watch, please let me know in the comments or by emailing melynmelyn at gmail dot com. I’ll share them in a future post. Thanks. By the way, using the RSS button, you can subscribe to the posts in this blog and read them in your newsreader/feedreader. Written and first published by…
-
Making Space workshops using more accessible digital storytelling tools
I’ve always been puzzled by 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 (called South Wales University since 2013) has been exploring lowering some of the barriers to continuation by devising forms that use widely-available online production tools and social media tools. Carwyn Evans, Lisa Heledd Jones and Susie Pratt of BBC Wales and University of Glamorgan held a workshop in Aberystwyth just before DS3 where they led a…
-
Geoff Charles, Welsh documentary photographer
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 to make digital stories. Young people work with older people to make a digital story of 1939-1959 recollections 2. staging multimedia conferences 3. digitising photos by Geoff Charles I nearly fell off my chair when they told me about the Geoff Charles element. Geoff was a prolific Welsh documentary photographer. He took a photo…
-
Tokyo Mell Expo 2008 presentation
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 questions about this: 1. What motivation and opportunities could be given to people in Japan to make more use of the creative capacity of their mobile devices and computers? 2. Which ‘forms’ of Digital Storytelling would be most attractive in this country to both author & audience of the content?3. And how could this…
-
Match Game – the five steps
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 inserted into give-away boxes of the long-handled cooks matches you need to play this game when we went on the Digital Storytelling Gathering tour around Wales last month. In the interests of sharing these instructions with people I’ll meet in Japan, I’m reproducing Gilly’s instructions here: ————————————— Alan Thomas plays the match game at BBC…
-
Media Exprimo, Japan
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 extensively in the Far East on developments in mobile technology. This wasn’t the last time I met Akiko and Aske. They’ve both maintained a lively interest in Digital Storytelling developments in Wales. In fact, Akiko has returned to Wales twice: she came to a Digital Storytelling workshop we ran in Cardiff and she…
-
Download this new guide to digital storytelling
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 which has a bonus section by Lisa Heledd outlining various new forms of digital storytelling, together with instructions – DS Recipe Cards, kind of. The pdf currently lacks Simon Turner’s fantastic article about recording people’s voices. Table of Contents: Introduction The ideal venue Briefing participants Find the story Getting the story down on paper…