Daniel Meadows presented the morning keynote at DS1 in Aberystwyth. No matter how many times I hear Daniel speak, I always learn something new. His insistence on everyone having access to the mass media is fantastic. Big media could learn lots by listening to him.
One of my first introductions to digital storytelling was the Great Canadian Story Engine website. Ana Serrano was behind this project. She was also involved in one of my favourite location-based story projects – murmur – run by Shawn Micalef and friends. Ana began her DS1 keynote in Aberystwyth by re-telling Twm Morus’s story about a farmhouse extension blocking a fairies’ highway and drew analogies with the emergence of ‘authentic media’ and the importance of the fact that publication tools and media are merging and becoming more accessible. Ana paid Wales a terrific compliment when she said she believed we’re at the rim of the revolution.
I spent the two days leading up to the conference working with Caerphilly youth charity Canllaw Online in their own Aberystwyth Digilab with three young people who were making their first digital stories. We were using two Fujitsu multimedia PCs. They were lightning fast. Iād borrowed a Sanyo Xacti HD1 camcorder, which records video on memory cards. The major issues the two days revealed were:
- it’s important to have image editing software that can easily ‘crop to target size’
- it’s better if all the machines you’re using for the training are set up to look exactly the same with exactly the same software.
- the DVD burning software needs to be able to burn playable DVD movie discs at the end; not just DVD data.
(I recovered this story – written in 2006 – from backups when I heard Joe Lambert was compiling an international history of digital storytelling festivals and conferences. He had links to later DS conferences and festivals, but not to DS1. So this is for you Joe š )