This page gives writer’s some links to online material about digital storytelling. You don’t need to consider any of this material as a “bible” for creating digital stories for the Lake Illawarra MAP project. We may well work in ways that are slightly different to what is described in any of these resources. And we may produce works that are different in character. However these examples and works give a great starting point and grounding place for our digital stories.

Follow this link to a beautiful example of digital storytelling that is about memory and place. “My Passions” is a digital story made as part of the BBC’s award winning “Capture Wales” Digital Storytelling project.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/yourvideo/pages/bob_ashcroft_01.shtml

Daniel Meadows helped to develop the digital storytelling projects for the BBC including “Capture Wales”. His first digital story is “Polyphoto” and it is an exceptional example of the economy of images when telling a story.

http://www.photobus.co.uk/index.php?id=1

Have a look also at Daniel Meadows digital story “Scissors”. This gives a feel for using more complex images that could be created by participants and incorporated into a digital story - as well as showing more complex editing.

http://www.photobus.co.uk/index.php?id=2&gallery=polyfoto.flv

Have a read about what Daniel has to say about Digital Storytelling from the rest of his site.

Daniel got his start in “Digital Storytelling” from a group of people in California. They formed the “Centre for Digital Storytelling.” Have a look at the “Digital Storytelling Cookbook” from their site via the link below. The section under “Getting Started“ called “Finding your story” is particularly good I think for helping people to think about the “point” of their story - by identifying what archetype of story it might be.

http://www.storycenter.org/memvoice/pages/cookbook.html

And for some Australian examples of digital storytelling have a look at these pages from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

http://www.acmi.net.au/video_community_people.htm

http://www.acmi.net.au/video_community_stories_places.htm

A couple of thoughts from me:

1. 1.Although 250 words seems very arbitrary as a length - there is certainly something to said for this brevity. We should be very confident that the story will benefit from being longer before we recommend going longer to any of our participants.
   

2. 2.It is fine for us to work in the way that the participants want to work - if they do not want to play with computers they can act as “Producers” and “Directors” and we can operate computers for them. Similarly, if someone wants to speak their story rather than writing, we could work with them using voice recording as a way to construct the “script”. However I do think that this process should be subject to editing - and so is unlikely to be achieved in a one off recording of a story.
   

3. 3.Trying to get away from the pictures when telling the story or writing the script is usually good because otherwise people tend to make their story a “slideshow” i.e. this picture is of when I was ... rather than developing a narrative.
   

4. 4.I think we can also experiment with Digital Storytelling forms in this MAP project especially if we are open to keeping the process responsive to individuals. Experimentation is likely to work if we strive to keep a high level of personal authenticity to the work by encouraging the use of as much of what is authentic to the individual participant as possible i.e. their photos, their voice etc.
   

5. 5.This being said I think we should also strive to assist participants to achieve excellence and sometimes this will mean gently guiding them beyond what they thought they could achieve or have envisaged for their story.
   

I hope this has been useful for you and look forward to working alongside you all.

Phillip Crawford

MAP Project Coordinator

0427697173