The Digital Story Telling Tutorial (Week 10 Activities)

The Digital Story Telling Tutorial

Element #1: Take a look at the two examples and see if you can identify the purpose behind each story. What is the point of view in each? Whose voice do you hear?

In the first example you hear two or three different children’s voices.  They appear to be students who have taken a field trip to a local salt mine and were now describing the steps of salt production in pictures and narration.

I believe story in the second example was created by the teacher to offer a video tour to his community, to parents of students, and (possibly) to the organizations who had given grants for a fish hatchery project.  The audience seems to be adults because most of the information was not narrated vocally, and many grade school children could not read the scrolling text quickly enough.  The point of view is from the head of the project.

Element #2: See if you can find a dramatic question in the examples for this section. Is the question resolved in each movie or are you left without a resolution?

The dramatic question in the first video is “Are we making Guam ugly?”  Here the question is only resolved when the video ask viewers to do their part to keep it beautiful.  I’d like to add the emotional appeal of the question may be heightened for the target audience.  I’m guessing it’s a song known in Guam (and may be about the beauty of Guam).

The dramatic question in the second story seems to be, “Where did our communities fishing trade come from?”  The question is resolved in the legend (as so many questions are).

Element #3: See if you can identify the emotional paradigms behind these stories.

The first example keeps us hooked by the suspense of wondering if the girl will harm herself.  We have to keep watching to see if she will.  Even though no character development has taken place, and we have no real reason to care about this character, the archetype of a depressed teen and our fear that this will happen to someone we do know, keeps us hooked.  Interestingly, this video was not telling us to help as much as it was telling depressed teens to let people help them.

The emotional content in the second video comes from the subject’s story that she had lost her grandparents before she cared enough to learn about their history and customs.  We stay hooked because we begin thinking that we should take action now learn from our aging loved ones.

Element #4: What impact that the voice plays on the overall effect of the story.

A voice of a narrator who was personally involved in the story adds authenticity to the information, and increases the dramatic effect because first-person narrators emphasize important elements when the tell the story.  In these examples, the voices personalize the story.

Element #5: What impact does the music have on the emotional content or purpose of the story?

Music drives emotion.  People have always known this, and the popularity of arts like opera, melodrama, musicals, television, and film prove that it still works.  Music can even push emotion where acting, narration, or story are lacking.  Even poorly constructed moments in a film or television show can be “saved” by the right choice of background music.  On the other side of that coin, it takes A LOT of talent and creativity to create an effective digital product that contains no music.  I couldn’t do it.

Element #6: Look at the examples in this section and consider the decisions the authors made about length of clips, types of transitions and sequence of events. Are you able (as a viewer) to fill in the missing pieces? Give an example?

Yes!  I completely agree with the instructions in this element.  So often beginning storytellers forget to ‘tell the most with the least.’  In the first example, the pictures tell us how crowded the girl’s life is, and where she goes when she needs some privacy.  None of that needed to be explained in the narration.  Also the story moved quickly because of the pace of the slide transitions.

Element #7: How does the narrator use their voice to pace the story? Give a specific example.

An urgent voice or an enthusiastic voice create a fast pace.  In the earthquake video the pace is urgent because of the content.  A relaxed pace would be inappropriate for this topic.  Hopefully, most storytellers will know intuitively to sync their voices to content, imagery, and music (but we have all seen local ads or amateur videos where that is not the case).

The Gift of Nonviolence by Leroy Moore

Analysis of "The Gift of Nonviolence"

Point of View: The narrator is an eloquent elderly gentleman recounting the day he first resisted against his abusive father.  Moore was sixteen at the time, and now, several decades later, he looks back in wisdom at the nonviolent means by which he put an end to a childhood of abuse.  Moore’s voice is calm, collected, warm, and insightful.  His words are few, but extremely well chosen.  At the end of the story we see that Moore’s point of view is that of a seasoned nonviolence advocate who has participated in nonviolence training in protest of nuclear weapon production.

Dramatic Question: The implied dramatic question is “Can nonviolent protests be effective against abuse and war?”  According to the patient sounding narrator the answer seems to be “yes.”  First he explains his nonviolent resistance against his father, who abused him through childhood with different weapons, including a rubber garden hose.  He then cites nuclear war as the epitome of violence, and alludes to the use of nonviolent tactics to help protest a weapons plant.

Emotional Content:  I related to the title of the story, because “nonviolence” can be an intriguing emotional word.  The narrator’s powerful opening statement was that he had put a stop to his father’s beating him with garden hose, on the last night of his junior year.  This kept me involved in the story, because I wanted to see how he’d stopped the abuse.  The narrator, however, continues beyond this incident to show how nonviolence was a part of things he’d accomplished later in life.  Very powerful.