These DS 106 Daily Create assignments really help me work on my Adobe Illustrator skills from time to time. Gives me some idea on how I could use the application.
Month: February 2016
Digital Story Critique: “This is My Story: Dawn’s Story”
One of the Denver public television stations, Colorado Public Television 12 (CPT12), is supporting an initiative called American Graduate, an ongoing project to help local youth in their quest to avoid the pitfalls of life and graduate from high school. Digital storytelling plays a key role in this initiative and CPT12 has posted a variety of videos created by American Graduate participants. One of them is a story about a girl’s perspective in the foster care system called “This is My Story: Dawn’s Story.”
For this critique, I chose to review the video using the following assessment traits:
- Writing – The author, Dawn, uses a very simple narrative to describe to the audience her experience as a foster child. Details, like meeting her foster parents for the first time and going to church with her “new” sister, draw the viewer into her life. On the whole, it sounded like Dawn had a good relationship with her new family while striving to maintain ties with her birth mother. There was no hint of animosity or malice towards either group of people.
- Flow/organization/pacing – Not including American Graduate promotional material, Dawn’s story runs about 4 minutes. She organizes her experience in a very simple chronological timeline from meeting her foster parents to seeing her birth mother again. The linear progression is effective and, in some ways, takes the audience on a bit of an emotional roller coaster ride. Nothing feels rushed and the photo images appear at a very steady pace. The background music compliments the tone of the video.
- Media application – In addition to the aforementioned background music, Dawn includes a good mix of original photos and video. At the end, Dawn shows a present-day picture of the young woman she has become. On the other hand, I thought she repeated a number of images too often and used some odd video effects that seemed out of place.
Stories of adversity take many shapes. I’m glad there’s a Denver-area television station that is giving young people an opportunity to express their rocky journeys through life.
Scholarly Response: “Who is Trying To Destroy Digital Storytelling?”
Every week when I conduct a Google search to find articles on “digital storytelling”, I come up with a variety of links. At the top of the search page came this piece posted yesterday: “Who is Trying To Destroy Digital Storytelling?” It comes from a website created by a Boston-area digital marketing firm called Skyword. Personally, I’m a little suspicious of for-profit organizations that describe digital storytelling in terms of “brands”, “markets” and “entertaining experiences.” I’ve come to believe that true storytelling should be influenced by factors such as personal desires rather than corporate profits.
Still, I decided to delve into the reading. The author, a content marketing specialist named John Montesi, gives some compelling examples of well-know tech companies making investments and taking risks in far away lands to give people an opportunity to tell their stories online. Montesi cites YouTube’s relaunch in Pakistan to meet the government’s rules about illegal content while striving to ensure that the citizens there still have an opportunity to upload and view content. In addition, Montesi mentions Twitter’s battle with ISIS after it shut down many terror-related accounts. It’s a tightrope that Twitter must balance between confronting the promotion of terrorism but not to the point where the company denies account users’ rights to freedom of expression. Much of the article praises the efforts of these social media companies dealing with very tighly-controlled governments and radical organizations. I wish Montesi would have said something about how many of these same companies are blocked completely in China. I guess that will be something for another article.
Much of what is considered digital storytelling, whether for-profit or non-profit, would not be possible without the efforts and investment of companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Definitely something we should all “Like.”
DS106 Daily Create: It’s 1:06pm Somewhere….
… but it’s not happy hour yet. Dang it! Had to plan to get this photo at Union Station in Denver. Fortunately, the clocks inside were set correctly. The ones on the outside are not always so precise.
DS106 Audio Assignment: Movie As Radio
I was amazed at how quickly I was able to put this DS106 Assignment Bank project together. With all the movie audio, including songs and some soundbites, is available on a CD, it makes things much easier. This was a favorite soundtrack to listen to back in 1995. In Madison, a person could hear “Son of a Preacher Man” playing in every other bar on State Street. One of my favorite films. I’m still waiting to go to Paris to get a “Royale With Cheese” !