Contemplating the process of telling a story well and then trying to figure out how to tell it with multimedia was challenging and fun. I truly enjoyed the “Digital Storytelling Cookbook” by Joe Lambert. The author furnished many guidelines to adhere to, pitfalls to avoid, and overall, he enlightened me to a world of the multimedia narrative. Lambert was right about “the editor” in all of us. He talks about the fact that “most of us carry around a little voice, an editor, that tells us that what we have to say is not entertaining or substantial enough to be heard. That editor is a composite figure of everyone in our lives who has diminished our sense of creative ability…”(Lambert, 2007). It may be due to this editor that I struggled to find a topic. In the end, I selected a digital memorial to my older sister who passed away seven months ago. She was only 43 and had lived with many ailments most of her adult life.
Even though I have used products such as Microsoft’s PhotoStory and MovieMaker before, I never really thought about the production side of the process. Usually, I just diced up some flashy images, added a dash of music, and hoped that the end result would be satisfying to the audience’s palate. This week has taught me that deep thought and consideration goes into the digital storytelling recipe and that features such as bare truth, perspective, and insight add essence to the flavor.
Actually seeing your story unfold through scripting and storyboarding before you ever touch the computer was a novel step for me. Additionally, using my own voice to narrate was strange. During playback, one’s voice never sounds like you hear it inside your head. Even though my topic was serious and solemn, I recognize that I still need a great deal of practice when it comes to voice-overs. In the final assembly stage, it was really coming together. The terrifying part was posting my final product to YouTube to share amongst my peers. This project was very personal and brought back many painful memories of January. It was also medicinal, in a sense, to revisit my sister and pay homage to her life. Selfishly, this storytelling process was as much for me and my grieving process as it was to memorialize my sister and share that with the world.
I think the key to anyone’s “story” is to write each and every day. Then reflect on your writing, twist it, turn it, flip it upside down, and come at it from other angles. This will spawn ideas you never thought you had inside you in the first place. Of course, script and storyboard it, digitize it, and share it. Be what many of our students already are - Web 2.0 producers within our shrinking world.
Here is the link to my creation:
Yvonne Page - Memorial
Please let me know what you think.
Lambert, J. (2007, February). Digital storytelling cookbook, 1-30. Story Center. Retrieved April 4, 2009, from http://www.storycenter.org/cookbook.pdf
