Dec 1 is the deadline for submission for the Focal International Awards 2009 for best use of archive footage in all kinds of productions, including short films like digital stories. According to the rules: 1. they’ll only consider entries containing moving-image archive, not stills 2. there’s a £57.50 submission fee per entry. David Puttnam will present the awards to the winners in London on 5 May 2009.
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Remembrance stories
Here are two stories made especially to mark the fact that 90 years have passed since the end of World War I: Rappel – this is a music collaboration between Newport’s MC Gareth Leaman (Versatile) and DJ Jamie Winchester, Pentalk Lab, at the Riverfront in Newport. I’ve always been drawn to the storytelling aspect of rap and I think the mixing of rap with images of WWI by these two musicians gives a respectful contemporary reflection on the horrors of the Great War. My River – children from Llandogo Primary School in Monmouth remember their relatives who fought in WWl. The device of children holding their old family photos up…
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Inclusion award nomination
Communities@One has been nominated for a European inclusion award. I’m delighted about this because it’s largely thanks to C@1 funding and direct broker support that digital storytelling is thriving in Wales. Congratulations to Alun Burge and the team.
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Evidence of benefits to support funding bid
I was asked earlier today for links to reports outlining benefits of digital storytelling to communities by someone drafting a funding bid. I thought it might be useful to share these links with you. Many of these link to PowerPoint and PDF files: Case studies about DS and older people ssrg.org.uk – scotland victas.unitingcare.org.au Case study about working with second-generation immigrants: http://www.mediabiotope.com/ English at bottom of page Health therapeutic-effects-of-digital-storytelling where I posted a blog entry urging people to feed into Arts in Health Strategy Unfortunately, there’s no mention of DS in the strategy. Young people: you may be able to pull out a quote from ELI7021.pdf Education/public service archimuse.com ……
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End of workshop photo
You can tell how well a workshop went by looking at the end-of-workshop photo. This one was taken at the end of the first Media Conté Workshop where media exprimo and Aichi Shukutoku University worked with teenagers in Kani, Gifu Prefecture, in the centre of Japan’s largest island. Kani is well known for its car manufacturing. One of the leaders of Media Conté is Akiko Ogawa, who’s made two trips to Wales to study digital storytelling. She told me earlier this year there were many Japanese descendants from Brasil and other countries who had come to work in Kani’s factories. She told me she wanted to find a way of…
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What a museum is
Museums used to be buildings that housed artefacts. The experts contextualised these objects by writing historically-accurate interpretations of their meaning. Visitors used to enter museums to absorb this. How often have you looked at objects in museums and thought that the meaning an object has to you is different to the one conveyed by the museum’s card, plaque, kiosk, etc.? New technology and ways of working mean that can change. Some museum managers are excited about the possibilities opened up by enabling visitors to share their own interpretations and are asking their staff to work in new ways. I did once hear one museum worker say “But that isn’t what…
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National Older People’s Day stories
Digital Stories available to watch again on BBC iPlayer until the middle of next week: “To celebrate National Older People’s Day and to change some outdated stereotypes on ageing, a collection of short stories written, recorded, edited and produced by people living in Wales.” This is a link for people reading this in the UK only, sorry, because iPlayer only works in the UK.
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EDSN
The European Digital Storytelling Network is now active and it looks as if the Copenhagen workshops have been going really well. Good luck to this new organisation.
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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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The trouble with publishing your digital story on YouTube is
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…