Often times, an instance of adversity can have long-lasting effects. In searching for digital stories that give a short glimpse into how people adjust to sudden changes in their lives, I found another story from the Charlestown Digital Story Project entitled “It Takes a Crisis.” The narrator, Charlotte Valentine, talks about how the psychological adjustments she had to make before and after she decided to divorce after 13 years of marriage. For this critique, I chose to critique the story using the following assessment traits:
Originality/Voice/Creativity – From her time as a shy child to her success as a confident Certified Public Accountant, Valentine narrates her own story. She discusses how growing up, she always was tough to “please others” and then later on, she learned how to “please herself.” Although the narration sounds a bit scripted, it feels genuine. The story collaborator, Daniel Rodriguez, gives Valentine “room” to tell her story through her voice and her archived photographs.
Flow/Organization/Pacing – Rodriguez wisely presents the story in chronological order. He organizes the still photos making it easy for the viewer to absorb. There’s a nice variety of image movement (some story creators rely too much on bring the photos in and out, which was popularized by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns). The pacing of the images is accompanied by cuts of light and playful piano music.
Media Grammar – Overall, the media elements are put together well, but their is a moment where it looks like a photo of Valentine in her flooded basement, after surviving a hurricane, appears to be Photoshopped. This moment seems to interrupt the genuine nature of the archived images.
I highly recommend anyone to view either this story or the many other stories on this site.
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.
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.”
Most of the time, change is good. For our Learning with Digital Stories class (INTE5340), we were given the option of critiquing a different reading from the book Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. The author is Joe Lambert, who founded the Center For Digital Storytelling in 1994. The organization’s website, StoryCenter, showcases a variety of digital stories that include themes such as health, family, education and social justice. I’ve already critiqued a couple of these videos on my blog. After reading this chapter, I felt like I was having an “Ah Ha!” moment in realizing the purpose of humans to tell stories.
This first chapter, entitled “The Work of Story”, explored an interesting explanation on the origins of storytelling. From Lambert’s point of view, much of it has to do with human survival and endurance. I found this significant since a major focal theme I am concentrating on in this class is adversity. Lambert nicely explains that:
“The memories associated with our most important life lessons are inevitably those with either strong emotional encoding at the moment, as in traumas or events involving those close to us” (p.8).
After reading this sentence, I thought about not only the pivotal moments in my life, but also those moments in history that other people have witnessed and felt compelled to report to the rest of humanity. The Nazi Holocaust is a perfect example. Under the cover of war, millions of innocent civilians were systematically executed while the German people never suspected a thing under the Nazi propaganda system. It wasn’t until years after World War II ended, when people began listening to the growing number of stories from the survivors, did the public become more aware of the horrific slaughter.
Lambert also discusses how 20th century popular culture tapped into myths to help explore a industrial age society that was feeling dislocated as people were moving from the country to the city. For example, he cites how the Western genre of film “showed us how to bring frontier ethics into our chaotic urban experience, mapping the pastoral ideal of self-sufficiency and family integrity onto a suburban ideal of the single family dwelling” (p.9). Director John Ford was masterful in this genre with films such as Stagecoach, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The author’s ideas of storytelling in American cinema got me thinking about another classic film: Jaws.
In the middle of the movie, the three main characters discus the origins of their tattoos. Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) asks the boat captain Quint (Robert Shaw) about an old tattoo on his arm. Quint tells Hooper it’s the name of a U.S. Navy ship he served on during World War II: The U.S.S. Indianapolis. Prodded on by local sheriff Brodie (Roy Scheider), Quint tells the tale of how he survived a massive shark attack after the U.S.S. Indianapolis was torpedo by a Japanese submarine. It’s one of the most memorable moments in film history, but when reading this chapter, the scene got me thinking about Lambert’s idea of storytelling.
In reality, those actual crew members from the U.S.S. Indianapolis who survived that horrific ordeal felt a need to tell that story years later for several reasons. First, because they were on a top-secret mission to deliver the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, they could not discuss what happened for many years. Secondly, there reached a point after the end of World War II that people didn’t want to hear “war stories”, especially ones that ended in disaster. Due to the fact that for many years, even decades, had passed before the truth could finally be told about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, it was up to survivors to keep the story alive so that others would understand the many sacrifices made by soldiers, sailors and airmen in harm’s way. These such stories need to be told for the benefit of future generations. Lambert mentions the importance of storytelling when he adds, “Story… works biologically to insure the total recall of those events which define we have ingrained as of greatest emotional importance to us” (p.8).
I’m looking forward to the next reading from Joe Lambert’s book.
“The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.” – Aristotle
For my focal theme this semester in INTE 5340, I’ve chosen the topic of adversity. Since 2003, I’ve gone through several layoffs working in the television production business. It’s hard to describe how it feels to have a stable income and sense of purpose taken away from you through no fault of your own. Explanations such as “It’s the economy” or “We needed to make a change” do little to address the traumatic shock of a livelihood taken.
I’ve often thought of adversity as a challenge not by choice, whereas an adventure (swimming with sharks, parachuting, etc) is a challenge by choice. My intention is to focus on economic adversity as a result of a job loss. I think this is a topic that does not get enough attention in our society. This project will unfold over the semester on my blog.
My main learning goals:
I hope to learn how digital storytelling content can best be used to express how people, like myself, deal with the adversity of a job loss.
I hope visitors to my blog will learn how the adversity of job loss and unemployment can impact the lives of people in the United States.
