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 is – Pondering on museum paradigms: “Living-memory sections of museums are more to do with memories than artefacts. So museum managers can feel free to move away from traditional perceptions of what it is they’re doing. That’s when they’ll feel it’s OK to instruct their staff to spend less time on objects and…
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How to tell a story using five 5-second clips
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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Aberystwyth DS4 Festival advance details
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 and brings you up to date with what is happening in the world of Digital Storytelling. Whether you work in education, the community or as an artist, it is your opportunity to share experiences, explore new creative ideas, see the latest technological developments, look at examples of best practice in the U.K. and worldwide…
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Five ways to make your digital storytelling project more sustainable
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 take part. If people don’t have an archive of their own photos, help them take bespoke contemporary ones; if people don’t have much time, offer a form they can create in less time; meet people where they already gather; etc. 4. scale up activities. E.g. hold training the trainers workshops so you get…
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Bug eats VHS
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 I’ll probably do this is to make real-time recordings from VHS to miniDV and then use Firewire to ingest that footage onto my hard disk where I can import it into an editing package and then render it out as a DV PAL file. I should probably use an open standard like DIV-X in…
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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…
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Pink fingertip syndrome
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 syndrome – I pressed the buttons differently when I was demonstrating and the server ‘knew’.
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Avoid rhyming poetry – number 6 of 7 DS no-nos
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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Avoid show and tell – number 5 of 7 DS no-nos
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.