I’ve gained a lot of insight from Joe Lambert’s book Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community over the last several weeks. In addition, I’ve viewed a number of digital stories on StoryCenter, the organization that Lambert helped to develop in California. Recently, I created a digital story of my own for my Learning with Digital Stories class (INTE5340) at the University of Colorado-Denver. I incorporated about a dozen photographs of objects I had collected over the years from various former employers to create a 3-minute story called “Mementos of Adversity.” As much as I wanted the images to speak for themselves, I needed to include some detailed narration to give the viewer some idea of the significance of the photographed objects. After reading this chapter, I’m wondering if what I created in iMovie last week could be improved.
In the beginning of the chapter, Lambert comments, “Originality is all about shared culture and context, what I might find trite and sentimental, you might find engrossingly powerful” (p. 106). Lambert uses a digital story entitled “Camaro Boy” as an example. The creator, Robert Kershaw, took an old photograph of his favorite car and cleverly deconstructed the image over the first 55 seconds of the story. Kershaw was able to “reveal” sections of photo to draw the viewer into the story. In addition, he includes a cropped image of him when he talks about his haircut and sunglasses. These are very effective visual design techniques that seem best utilized with images containing people’s faces. My recent presentation was primarily objects, so I chose slow and simple zooms and pans, even though Lambert comments that such actions “should be practiced with constraints” (p.111). I chose a steady visual pacing of images, but that’s not always the preferred method. Lambert notes how Kershaw changes the pace of images after 2 minutes to a faster pace that illustrates the change in Kershaw’s life over 20 years. “Life went on, like a flashing of scenes before our eyes, is suggested by the urgency of the pace” Lambert comments (p.110).
In addition, Lambert uses a second storytelling example of a man named Robert Gerli who created a audiovisual traveling memoir during a trip through Europe. Lambert comments how Gerli was able to allow his audio narration to be driven by the visual elements. There’s a consistent use of a visual portrait to introduce members of his travel group and create a pattern that Gerli uses later in the story. Sometimes repetition does have a purpose.
One thing in particular that Lambert said caught my eye. “We are leaving an era of keyboard and mouse based computing, the world will soon be screens small, medium, and large that we touch to design and communicate” he comments (p. 112). To a certain extent, I believe this to be true. People are communicating and sharing raw expressions of themselves by smartphone, tablet and laptop. The composition and refinement of such raw expressions, however, are still being assembled on editing systems with computer monitors, keyboards and mice. The large 27 inch canvas of my 8GB RAM iMac gives me an opportunity to create digital compositions with a wide range of content. I doubt I could accomplish such things on my iPhone.
Thank you Mr. Joe Lambert for your insights. I’ll keep an eye out for your writings online.