The person who’s taught me more than anyone about helping people find their story is Gilly Adams. She was the main story facilitator of BBC Capture Wales and she shaped the Story Circle day so it was a close a fit as possible for the digital storyteller in Wales.
At DS3 in 2008, Gilly spoke in her keynote of the gift culture of digital storytelling “…where no money changes hands but the currency is the generosity of grace in sharing stories”. The person who hears the story gains two benefits:
1. they get a unique glimpse into the heart of the teller
2. they can often say: “hey, that’s about me!” and they get to reflect on that revelation.
An example of generosity Gilly gave was that of someone who comes to a DST workshop with a story in mind but, having heard the stories other people tell, they sometimes change their mind and say: “Actually, I want to tell you this…”.
Here are three links to articles written by Gilly for BBC Capture Wales guides: 1. Finding the Story; 2. Getting the Story Down on Paper; 3. Refining and Completing the Story
One of the funnest, quickest and most surprising story games Gilly introduced us to was The Match Game. I don’t know whether or not Gilly ever ‘wrote up’ the game, but here’s a link to my interpretation of her Match Game.
Another person who learned a lot from Gilly is Barrie Stevenson of Telling Lives. He has some useful guidance in Barrie’s freely-downloadable PDF which he wrote for BBC Raw.
On his blog, Barrie also recommends the first two chapters of KQED’s digital storytelling guide.
If you’d like to add your own suggestions, please use the comments below. I’m actually writing this post in response to a comment by Becky Blab asking me to elaborate on step three of these six steps to sustainable digital storytelling project.
Written and first published by Gareth Morlais on 15 February 2011. Because of the age of this article, not all of the links still work. But I’ve left them here so you can search on the Wayback Machine.
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