Week 4: Digital Storytelling, Part I

Today we shifted gears from radio to digital storytelling. This week you'll be reinventing your radio essay as a digital storytelling piece — that is, isolating a moment or an emotional/psychological aspect of the story and "unpacking" it through the use of images as well as sound.

In class, we looked at some video pieces that illustrate different possible approaches to this assignment. Some combine video and narration in direct, literal ways; others use a more experimental video approach.

You are free to craft your video assignment any way you choose: You can keep or leave out the narration, dialogue, and SFX you used in the radio piece; you can change the format from narrative to open letter, meditation, etc. The important thing is that the video expands and deepens something about the original radio piece; by watching the video, the audience gets something it didn't get from the first version.

Full instructions and format example are given in Assignment Sheet #2: Digital Storytelling (download from left sidebar).

You may also do this assignment in video form rather than turn it in on paper. Be sure to host the video somewhere I can access it online next week.

Here are the videos we looked at today:

• Momnotmom by Thenmozhi Soundarajan
• Looking at Things by Jay Dedman
• The Phone Call by Charles Patterson
• Open Letter by Adriana Aguilar

You can find lots more examples by following links from the videos above (Streetside Stories, the Center for Digital Storytelling). The best way to find new things is to start with a video you like, and see what that person has linked to (blogrolls, favorites/playlists on YouTube, etc.).

The tech tools we looked at in class today were Eyespot (video editing) and Odeo (sound recording). You can find lots of video and audio resources at the Ourmedia Open Resource Directory.