Clay's Blog

At the beginning of last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop hosted by the Innovative Learning Center on Digital Storytelling. The workshop was led by two great facilitators from the Center for Digital Storytelling based in Berkeley, California. Daniel Weinshenker, the Director of the Denver Office, and Jessica McCoy, an instructor based at the Berkeley office, did a wonderful job leading the workshop. If you’re unfamiliar with Digital Storytelling, take a look at the Center’s website. Jessica is also involved with an organization called Stories for Change. Both websites host several amazing examples of digital stories.What I found most valuable in participating in the workshop was the opportunity to see a mature process for helping participants formulate and incrementally improve their stories in such a way that simply engaging in the process in good faith led to a product that was drastically better for having been through it. Participants were asked to come with a written script in the range of 350 words, or at least a set of notes that could be turned into a script. We were asked to gather together as much media as we could, such as pictures, video, sound recordings, and music, that would help to tell the story in more than words.

Early in the workshop, participants formed a story circle and presented their chosen stories to the other participants. The rules of the story circle, though simple, are meant to allow for a safe mechanism for getting feedback from the potential audience for the story. This initial engagement with the story in its performative aspects was invaluable for two reasons. First, it was an opportunity to hear the story as a spoken piece. And, second, and more importantly, it was a way to get feedback from others who are hearing the story. The kinds of suggestions for the most part took the form of statements like, “I like the way you talk about [some person in the narrative] and I wanted to know more about that.”

One of the key result of the story circle, for me at least, was the opportunity to see where it was that I was telling too much and not showing enough. Showing rather than just telling is one of the cornerstones of a good story. And in digital storytelling, one has a great advantage in showing rather than telling because one can select visual components to help achieve this goal. As an example of the editing process, here’s my initial script and the final script after editing based on feedback in the story circle. I’m still very happy with the original script as a written piece, but, without a doubt, the final version is much better as a spoken piece. If you’re interested in more details of the process take a look at the Digital Storytelling Cookbook, a free download on the Center’s website.

On the technical side, we held the workshop in the ILC Hands-on Classroom, where we have recently updated Dell machines running Windows XP. Several of the participants were Mac users and they used their own laptops. On the PC side, we used Sony Vegas Movie Studio to construct the final video files. On the Mac side, some participants used Final Cut Express and at least one used Final Cut Pro. The facilitators are able to tailor the training for either Mac or PC environments. Daniel and Jessica brought along a small audio mixer and a nice microphone. The audio was recorded on a Mac laptop. Of course, the voice recording is perhaps the single most important part of the digital story – bad voice quality will doom the final product more than any other individual constituent part.

This workshop was not meant simply for each of the participants to create a story project of their own, though this was a nice thing in itself. We’d like to take this excellent process and use it to teach other faculty and students in order to enable them to tell their own personal stories. There are obvious applications in our freshman writing curriculum, and this will be one of the places where we pilot this project. But on a larger scale, we’d like to help build up a story archive in conjunction with Tulane’s new focus on community service in the curriculum. As Tulane students go out into the community to aid in the reconstruction of New Orleans and other important volunteer projects, they will each have many stories to tell. And these stories will make a great showcase both for these students and for Tulane as an active participant in the life of New Orleans.

If you’re interested in seeing my story in its finished form, you can find it here:

YouTube