Stories to go

I've been back in Britain for a month. What do I hold onto from the Sedona Festival? The power of objects - the power to revive memories. In our storycircles we use objects to provoke stories at random. Passing a bag of objects around the circle each participant blindly removes one item. They are invited to write for ten minutes about some memory that the item provokes. Often the story they write at stage becomes the basis for their digital story script.
I want to explore this power further - for myself and for others.
I was inspired by the shoebox project introduced to the festival by Huw Davies from BBC Wales (I had travelled 5,500 miles to hear about something created less than two hundred miles from where I live!)
Second hand stories and My whole life for sale by John Freyer also draw heavily on objects as stories. In a different way so did Megan Hayward's Of day of night project use the power of objects. The central character created the fictional histories of objects to reawaken dreams. Those histories and her response to them are the content of a non linear on a CD-ROM . The line I remember was "the unexpected associations created by the collison of memories and dreams".
Perhaps by exploring the unexpected associations between events and memories our digital stories will reveal more not only to ourselves but our audiences too.

What's missing?

At the end of the festival I felt that something important had been missed in the presentations. After several days of listening, watching and participating where was the audience? Who were the stories being made for? Who would watch?
It seemed strange to me - someone from the BBC - for a creative event not to consider the audience. Before we make anything in the BBC we think about the potential audience and throughout the workshops we talk about what the audience will make of the story. But here in the USA there was almost no consideration given to publishing or broadcasting the stories. In fact there would be huge problems with rights if many of the stories were published because of the lavish use of commercially produced music.
I have emailed Denise Atchley and suggested a presentation next year on the subject of The Audience - who's watching our digital stories?

CyndiGreeningDigitalStory

This film was made at the Boot Camp that preceded the Digital Storytelling Festival in June 2004. CyndiGreeningDigitalStory

Storytelling games

The task. Create an interactive computer based game based on storytelling.

Thom Gillespie passed out index cards and asked everyone to submit one idea for a game. It's that moment your mind goes blank .... and then the competitive spirit kicks in and the process itself becomes a game you want to win even though we didn't know the rules at this stage.

The game of consequences appears to be unknown outside of Britain. Briefly it's a story writing game where each participant writes a paragraph under a defined heading, conceals their contribution by folding down the paper and passes their paper to the next player who adds their contribution under the next heading. The headings are simple e.g. The names of the characters, the place they met, what they said to each other etc. At the end of the game the stories are read out. They are often accidentally amusing.

Inspired by the earlier presentation on dreams and the collision of memories producing surprising and intriguing stories I built the interactive consequences game on two random elements - the players providing a third. The first; headings would be selected from a database, alongside images drawn at random from the internet would provide a context or subject for the paragraph. Once written an email is sent to the next player to continue the story. After it had been passed on through say ten players the story is forwarded to each of them . This provides the basis for each to write a new story. A system of judging/scoring determines the best one and hence the winner.

We were split into groups and handed a pack of ideas. Choose the best and decide how it would be developed. We chose one called Reconstruction. Players are allocated an historic site. Their task; to rebuild the history of the site; creating buildings, characters and scenarios aiming to recreate the society that occupied the site generations before. It is also a game of survival. The clock ticks; time progresses and the inhabitants have to survive against the odds. Scores are incremented for success. a high score board is created.

Coincidentally there was another English woman in my group who had based her idea on Consequences.

Next Thom asked each group to present their game idea to the room. Further ideas were added and suggestions made for funding and marketing.

A stimulating session opening a new door on storytelling - the competition. And the competitive side of game playing appeared to be VERY important for the American delegates. This despite the non competitive style of their digital storytelling - where the process is more important than the product.

PSB promotes digital storytelling

Leslie Rule works with schools providing a series of resources for use with immigrant communities in California. The Public Sertvice Broadaster KQED is promoting digital storytelling. There is a web page on their site outlining the work that Leslie is doing. Also staff at KQED are being trained in digital storytelling. Leslie runs workshops for schools and teachers who take it back to their schools.

Second Hand Stories

Second hand stories

Original thinking and a zany sense of humour marked out this presentation from the rest. On realising he was too attached to possessions John Freyer decided to put everything he owned up for sale on ebay. He even sold the ice cubes from his fridge "They were solid when I sold them!"
You can read the story here
All my life for sale

His current project is Second Hand Stories. After buying a second hand fire ambulance on EBay John drives from town to town buying items from garage sales and recording their story and history. He then sells the items on in the next town with the story and at a profit. The whole thing is being filmed on second hand equipment picked up along the way.

My first encounter with John was when he arrived at the festival with a bag full of bad taste shirts from a local clearance sale which he went on to wear in subsequent days. At the same time he bought a plastic drinks cup dispenser with a Kokopelli design on it. He auctioned it off during his presentation and knocked it down for $25 - it couldn't have cost him more that a dollar. Storyteller, original thinker and entrepreneur - I really enjoyed his presentation.

The histories and stories of objects has been a recurring theme at this festival.

Controversy over rights

JD Lasica introduced his Digital Media Revolution presentation on Saturday morning. It was broadly a protest about how the big players in the media world controlled the use of their content. He made a case for a simple process for home users and small educational projects to be able to obtain permission to use media. His attempts to obtain clearance to use clips of TV programmes, blockbuster movies and popular music in home movie projects had either fallen on deaf ears or been rejected. JD met with some informed questioning about copyright - particularly from those who felt the restrictions protected small artists as well as large corporations. He suggested that the big corporations would have to accept that in the digital world they would lose control of digitally available media.
A strong point was made by one of the delegates asking why anyone would want to use commercially produced material in a digital story when it was an opportunity to be creative and to produce original work.

The centre - one year on

Eduard Uzumeckis runs the Dana Atchley Centre for Digital Storytelling at the Sedona Centre for Arts and Technology.
Workshops started last November - participants are making films between three and five minutes long. He's also started community workshops where people are invited to submit their story after a three hour introductory session held on a Saturday. The script has to be submitted by email by midnight on the following Monday. They bring in their story assets for scanning etc. and the three day workshop follows. Ed showed us some of the films that his students had made. I spotted a few interesting techniques that added polish to the images. Individuals cropped from group pictures and the picture is reassembled as they feature in the story, building a composite image that retains the original order of the group picture but is still comprised of individual frames. Also crops from larger pictures were framed with a thin white border.
Eduard became very emotional as he paid tribute to Dana Atchley. He related how digital storytelling had changed his life and found it hard to get his words out. It had awakened an interest in photography and writing in him.
I observe here that an emotional involvement in projects like this often mean a certain amount of pain too. We invest our lives into something like digital storytelling - it draws us in - but we often have to negotiate with people who don't share our passions - often people who determine our future funding - and the process can be painful.

Capture Wales

As ever Daniel Meadows engaged the audience for every moment of his presentation. His passion for digital storytelling shone through from the moment his short summary of the the Capture Wales project began. He showed us a film made by his wife to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. We howled with laughter.
But Daniel was also very realistic about the future of our BBC projects. Anticipated funding from the Welsh Development Agency has not materialised and another potential partnership is going ahead without digital storytelling. The future of his project in it's present form is uncertain. There is no room for complacency. For me this was a realistic position and I identified with all too easily. In our vision there's such a lot to do - we are at such an early stage in this process - but we fear that we will soon be dismissed by the funders with glib statements like "we did that was last year" or "we've already done that" with no long term commitment. But progress is being made to keep the process alive with fresh thinking and this was demonstrated when Huw Davies introduced the Shoebox. It was designed to be a taster for digital storytelling with the aim of creating a one minute film in a day. Participants are invited to bring a shoebox of six to eight objects into their nearest BBC Wales Community Studio to tell a story. There's a short storycirle when the participants - up to five - tell the story prompted by their objects. A 100 word script is written and later recorded in stages in the community studio.. The objects are photographed and the images imported into Premiere. There's a short tutorial in Photoshop when the title is created. Next a Premiere demonstration and the images are dragged into the time line. Huw showed us a couple of stories - they were suprisingly good for such a short taster process.

Underground railroad

Stephen Marc is Professor of Art, Arizona State University. He showed us his complex layered pictures created as a result of his research in to the so called underground railroad. These were the hiding places used by activists to conceal slaves being smuggled out of the country. His images were primarily of the places as they exist today. The historical context is added in the overlaid pictures.
This is storytelling that depends largely on the way the visuals are compiled. While Stephen gave us a commentary the published work is visual. Wide landscape pages with no text.
It made us think of using some more complex montages that build as digital stories unfold.
More about Underground Railroad

Back Pocket Movie Making

Derrick Story demonstrated how to make short movies using a digital still camera, Quick Time Pro and an Apple iPOD - based on the assumption that most of these items would already be in the possession of storytellers it was a cheap way of making short web based movies.
he recommended the a small new Contax camera which captured movies 30fps at 640x480 px. Demonstrated a number of ways of keeping the camera still. e.g Ultrapod 2, Pillow Pod (bean bag), velcro straps and gaffer tape. He recommended Colkin filter holders to allow filters to be used with a compact digital camera on a tripod. Enhancing audio by recording on an iPOD using a plug in mic eg Griffin iTALK or Belkin iPODMIC. It records 16 bit .wav files. The files are added to the QT project using the add command and cut and paste. A double hand clap at the start of the film facilitates lip sync of the soundtrack with the movie.
Derrick has a book called Digital Photography Hacks. He also reommended the Macdev site for free QT Pro scripts and plug ins.

Derrick's rules for Back Pocket movies:

1. Capture the best audio possible
2. More light please
3. Ack! No backlight!
4. Hold your shots steady
5. Vary your angle
6. Keep it moving
7. Smile
8. Edit with vengeance
9. No loitering - 3 minutes of less
10. Avoid lengthy titles


This was a good practical session - lots of useful tips.

Check out MUJI

Check out MUJI a cellphone based interactive game. It involves moving through real locations collecting virtual objects and trading them with others playing the game. There's a wrire up in Wired - but I couldn't find it.

Others would inspire

King Lear Act 1 by Brother Blue. There are more ways of telling a story than simply sticking to the script. Personal stories as told by Brother Blue interpreted the story using characters from his own family. It engaged us - we learned as much about Brother Blue's family as we did King Lear's through this very personal storytelling. He put himself into it. This was just one of the clips of video he used to illustrate his talk amount the emotional and personal investment that makes stories come alive.
So the day began with Kevin Brooks' keynote "speech".
Returning the hire car had been the first job of the day. I'll miss having it. The car is essential for getting around here. These towns are designed for car drivers. Few people walk. One of the conference delegates tells me that it's too hot to walk in summer and too cold in winter. The car provides a temperature controlled environment to protect Americans from the extreems of their climate as they travel down the street to the store or amenity centre.
I'll also miss the wide open roads and country music playing on the car stereo. It sounds corny - but felt good - at least for the couple of days we had the car. The clerk at the car hire centre drove us to the college in time for the 8.30 start.
Dana Atchley's widow, Denise, opens the day with a welcome before introducing Kevin Brooks.
Six more speakers and a breakout session lay ahead before a barbeque dinner this evening. Some would provoke strong reactions in us, others would inspire. Some would do both at the same time. That was my experience with the next speaker, Megan Hayward of the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Non linear narratives, illustrated by an interactive CD ROM story "Of Day of Night". It's about a woman's road back to dreaming. Soemhow there was no conclusion to the story because of it's circular nature. But as Megan spoke I saw new possibilities. Could this process she'd used to create the CD be used in the process of discovering our own stories before they are written in a more engaging linear narative?
Our memories are fragments, our dreams are collisions of these fragments. Could the dreaming process be arrested in a piece od software and used creatively by randomly bringing fragments of memory together? Could a piece of software allow us to input those fragments of our histories and then replay them in a new order with collisions that create stories by resurrecting other more deeply hidden events and experiences from our memories? Using objects - things collected or discarded - and recording the story as the memory of it is prompted by these otherwise inconsequential items. In Megan's story the histories are fictional - but why should they not be more real, rooted in our own life stories. Although still affected by the faults of memory could those histories be revived with a freshness that comes from realisation and new possibilities to explain who we are and what we've experienced?
Model: Move around your space. Select objects, items, photos, letters, documents - go out and gather other triggers - places, people, on camera or video. Borrow other items from relatives and friends workplaces and the places you relax. Input or create a story for each prompt. What was, might have been, what happened, by whom, context, people, places consequences etc. Initiate random sequences and create collisions between those memories and as a result input new stories inspired by the process. Build the connections between the stories to create journeys and progressions. Disappointments, successes, limbos, epiphanies etc.
The result - a reconstruction of some of the black holes in our stories - the basis for stories more revealing and fresher than the anecdotes tripped out at every reunion or family gathering or story telling event. A more satifying outcome - using the techniques of non linear narative to provoke a traditionally contructed story.
After the talk I was given a sample of a piece of software that may achieve what I'd asked in my question to Megan. The software is called "Telling Stories" - Seth Socolow gave it to me. It's PC based so I'll have to wait to try it out.

The Blessing

A Native American blessing began the evening's proceedings on Wednesday.
We were assembled in the atrium of the college around the central pool anticipating the evening meal.

The Native American are involved in the life of the college through an agreement that allowed it to be built in the tribal area of the Yavapai.

Later we would see the digital stories made in the boot camp (workshop) that had preceded the festival. But before the film show, the meal. We stood in line with paper plates, received the food and picked up our conversations about storytelling.

Wilderness railroad

We had a tumbleweed moment today. The first event of the Digital Storytelling festival is tonight so after checking my email and responding where needed we headed along the highway in search of a train. Across the highway blew a ball of tumbleweed. It had misjudged its crossing and collided with our "fender". We were reminded of the nwild west heritage of this area.
The train runs on a 36 mile track from Clarkdale through a canyon cut into red rock. The Verde Canyon Rail Road was fully booked. A slightly officious booking clerk told us,
"It always is. You have to book the day before," so she took our names and put us on the standby list. She told us to come back at 12.30 to see if any tickets had been returned. We headed for Cottonwood.
Cottonwoood was established in 1879. It's only 125 years ago but the people here think it's old. In many ways it is. There is a village store that sells tourist tat at one side and hardware at the other. Steel shelves hold a small stock of bottles and tins on display. Stacked in single lines one or two items deep there's a sense that thing are not as good as they used to be around here. It is like stepping into the past - and who knows some of the things may be as old as the town. The Stars and Stripes flys outside and signs invite you to buy liquor and have your old clocks mended.
A lady sits in a shops with a few shelves of tourist information leaflets next to cut out figures of John Wayne and Mae West. Cottonwood was once the set for cowboy and other films. John Wayne and Elvis both stayed in the rooms above this shop. Suites named after them still attract tourists to stay there today. Elvis lives on here pursued by Hollywoods most famous cowboy!
Enough browsing. Time to return to the ticket office. No news of any returns yet. We buy lunch and join the hundreds of mainly retired Americans booked in by their tour operators for a ride on today's 1pm departure to Perkinsville.
After lunch Rupert gets assertive with the ticket clerk and comes away with two $40 tickets for the four hour trip. We're on our way.
There's a difficult moment as we rearrange the furniture in the rail car to get a better view. A sweet American lady, who's here house sitting in Sedona, is unsure about these two English men muscling in on her space. In the event we spent almost the entire journey in the open caboose one car down and she sat alone reading her book as though it was commuter train.
There's a cowboy on board. He does the commentary on the way out and sings to entertain the passengers on the way back. By his style he could be selling Mother Herbert's Secret Medication, but in this case he was selling the the views alongside the track. The most hype was the build up to the location of the bald eagle's nest. We expected to see proud parents with excited chicks - but no - they flew away weeks ago, leaving only a few sticks and a lot of white droppings on a cliff face. Bald Eagles are now rare south of the Canadian border, so the pair that migrate here from Alaska each winter do create a lot of interest but we felt let down after the sales talk!
Pulled by a huge double deisel locomotive the train wound its way through the canyon. The second largest in Arizona we're told - but at 21 miles long it compares badly with the Grand Canyon. The track clings to the valley side and twists it's way alongside the river taking us close to steep and tall red rock formations. Cacti with yellow flowers line the route and the river gives life to a snake of green growth that marks out the route for much of the way. The train carried it's excited American passengers nearer to the line's destination. Perkinsville comes into sight after two hours. Three huts, a derelict water tower and a wrecked jeep. The loco is detached from the front and using the double track here it's positioned at the other end for the journey home. As the engine passed we were encouraged to photograph the unique site of a locomotive decorated with a huge bald eagle, ther work of a wildlife artist who's also festooned the interior of the cars we were travelling in. The return trip felt like a journey too many. Surely we'd seen it all before. We had, but the gentler mid afternoon sun mellowed the rocks and changed our view We took even more pictures on the way back.
Driving back up the highway the beautiful red rocks of Sedona glowed scarlet in the evening sunshine. I drove and Rupert's pointed his camera through the windscreen and rattled off another film.
Time for the opening reception of the Digital Storytelling Festival.