Wellbeing, inclusion & diversity
Teacher resources & training
Digital Storytelling
The Process
Digital storytelling: an inclusive tool and post-pandemic healing methodology
School people have been facing a socio-emotional and learning crisis and students’ increasing lack of empathy, motivation and enthusiasm. The situation is getting worse due to the pandemic effects...
Trust the process
My tip for teachers would be to relax and get comfortable with the open-endedness and fluidity of the digital storytelling method...
What is digital storytelling?
Digital storytelling is the process of telling a digital story. A digital story is a video about 2 to 3 minutes where you create your personal narrative accompanied by a digital means so…
First of all….
It is personal. You create your own story and second of all it is accompanied by a digital means. So using images or video or music or animation or drawings or anything like that, and together that creates a digital story.
What happens during a story circle?
A story circle…
…is when you all bring in a personal item and you kind of explain what it means to you. So for myself I brought in a book of four leaf clovers.
…It was personal to me because it was a bunch of four leaf clovers that I had collected over the years and I used to collect them for every competition I did because I felt like it gave me a little bit of luck.
And it gave me the confidence to throw far. So I explained my story about that, but there was so many different…
…stories, and especially because on this masters course we have a lot of people from a lot of different cultures. It was a really interesting story circle because we got…
…only different answers and so many different stories from across the world. And it was a really interesting lesson.
So what happens in our story circle is that we were all asked to bring in an item that had a personal story connected to us.
So we all sat down in a circle and we all told our stories of our items. There were some very personal ones. There were some…
…more comedic ones like mine because I brought in a signed photo of one of the lead singers from a band.
And it was there just to give us a prompt of what a sort of story could end up being.
And if you wanted to sort of do your story on that, you could have done as a lot of people in our group have done.
Or you could completely change your mind. The story circle is just there for you to get out initial ideas of what you might want to do and…
…to understand what a narrative could be.
So during our story circle, I bought a moonstone ring from a trip that meant a lot…
…to me personally and…
…while you were sharing stories, it allowed me to…
…give a piece of myself in a way to everyone and let them know how it affected me, how it influenced my work afterwards as well.
And while we were sharing these stories, I felt like I was learning a bit more about each and every other person in the room.
And give me a chance to kind of connect with them on a different level rather than just the usual conversations that…
…we’d have.
How did you choose and…
…use the most relevant and appropriate images and videos.
Because it’s my own personal archive of footage and photos, I went with the most popular significant shots, stuff from Sports Illustrated and Washington Post.
After that I went to what was the most dynamic, what showed a bit of story and tried to put…
…a flow and reasoning behind it as well as the timeline and sequence.
So for me, being an actor, I went away and recorded a lot of videos of me acting to express my story, and then I brought these videos back which I did on a GoPro.
I put them into WeVideo at the appropriate times during the audio.
And for me, that allowed me to express my story a lot better than just using pictures.
So I think mine was slightly easier because I had a location focus, so it wasn’t like I had a general idea or a general story where I’d need to look at different years and different categories.
I was going on one specific anecdote, and with that obviously it happened at a cinema, so I was taking….
…you know pictures or inspiration from the said cinema.
Or you know, taking videos at my house where I can reflect on my personal story that will then relate on to the story that then happens at the location.
What type of music are you using and how did you go about choosing it?
The music that I’m using is actually just stock music from…
WeVideo.
I just picked it out. I listened to a lot of the music. There’s some very good ones on there and I found this sort of spooky one and I thought that really encapsulates the vibe…
…of the beginning bit of the story that I wanted to go with, and actually it helped me create a story from that almost, because it gave me the direction I wanted to go.
I got the music sorted and I thought what sort of images do I want with this music? It helped me just base my entire video off of that.
So for me, the story that I told during the workshop was a very personal one, a very emotional one…
…because it was closely linked to my family and for that reason I didn’t want to…
…pick stock music.
I looked for a piece that came close to that emotion. And I actually talked with my parents about it to double check if they thought that this piece would also do this story justice.
Because my story is about COVID-19 and my life during Shanghai Lockdown,
The deadened city reminded me of a zombie movie called 28 days later, so I decided to use its soundtrack. It is silent at first and then a little bit horrifying, just to fit my script.
This starts from a peaceful description to angry accusations. I want this music, along with my story, to show people what the virus did to our bodies was…
…not as horrible as what it did to our minds.
How did you go about recording the audio?
So for me that was funny because that was the first time I ever used a microphone. We used microphones.
And it was very weird because microphones pick up noises very strongly. I needed a couple of tries to get it right, but it was really cool doing that for the first time recording.
When I was doing my recording…
I realized that it was going to be difficult to continue in the English language, which is not my language, but I also discovered that it could be a very interesting subject to deal with in my digital stories.
So maybe the musicality or the intonation can reflect something important when I’m talking about immigration or coming from another country.
It doesn’t go smoothly…
…because I kind of have the fight with my own voice because like I used to be the one who comments another person who like oh can you like well, look up or look down or slow down, slow down a bit, but right now I’m the one who records myself and I was like…
…listen to my voice. I’m like OK, can you add this or can you add that? But it’s kind of weird because I’m also the one who who needs to fix the voice and I feel like this person is kind of like giving me…
…A little bit of knowledge that I need to know my natural voice. Otherwise I wouldn’t know how to proceed. I mean, like it’s kind of hard for me to complete…
…the voice or something like that.
At first I tried to use the microphone for recording with the computer, but I found it’s not easy to do editing with this, so I tried to use the editing app to record. Since this is not my first language…
I must pay attention with my pronunciation, my tone, and it’s quite difficult for me.
I must try to record it sentence by sentence, so it’s not easy for me, but I think it was a funny and…
…quite special experience for me than I haven’t done before.
How did script writing work for you? What did you enjoy?
So the script writing process for me wasn’t one that I typically take. I went in with the zero structure. I just kind of took the approach through like kind of like a stream of consciousness.
So I kind of just sat there, thought about my initial ideas and went from there and and because I knew one of my targets was to make it a little bit more personal, more relatable to other people I was bringing in some previous stories…
…Or things that my mum had told me. And I kind of had a suspicion that other people knew about or spoke about also. So I think obviously that inspired me.
And sometimes I find that my writing is better when I spontaneously write rather than going in with a premeditated idea.
So for myself I’m taking the MA Theatre course. I’m not particularly too good at writing scripts, so it was a section that I knew was going to….
…be difficult for me.
So I made sure that I asked for help around the class.
I wrote…
…my story out as it was and classic me…
I did a lot of waffling and the script was far too long, so I asked around for a lot of help and…
…After about 10 minutes…
…my classmates helped me cut it down, changed a couple of the words so it became more of a story rather than just me telling a memory and I left with something that I was extremely proud of.
Script writing for me… I sort of… I struggled with it very much actually because every time I wrote something I ended up not really having a narrative to it.
And so I was there and I used a technique that Mike Wilson taught us and it was…
…he wrote his stuff in verses like it was poetry. You hit a new line every time a new thought…
…comes into your head and after doing that every so often I actually ended up having a proper narrative of a story about winter, which is what I wanted to do mine on…
But I managed to get a story and a narrative about me going to a shop during winter and that was how I kept myself entertained during the dark months.
What have you been considering in the video editing process? Are you using stock images, creating footage, or using a personal archive?
I’m using my own personal archive because it’s quite a strange process. At first I write my own script and then I find some other photos in my archive to…
…to get along with the script that I wrote, but I also found out that ohh, I just want those photos to be deleted, not the script to be deleted. So it’s kind of like I need to rewrite and also rerecord and tell the stories by putting the photos first and then…
…put the story in after that.
Something like that.
So that one is a bit different to how I think some of my other peers have been doing it.
I’ve decided to take the leap and take this part of the module to experiment with something I’ve been interested in, but never actually done myself, which is animation.
Whether it will be good, I’m not sure, but I’m taking it as an opportunity to kind of explore something that I’m passionate about.
Using different programmes, using different tools and for me it’s all about kind of using new tools and experimenting with the environment that I have and whatever I have access to. So it’s less about choosing stock images and stock videos and more about creating those images myself.
But I also have an intention to make it bit like multimedia, so still have some videos I’ve taken on my phone…
…for example.
During my process…
…I understand that only visual and audio are these two senses we’re affecting. Luckily, I had plenty of archival footage and archival photos.
My journey in my story was well documented, so I had plenty of personal historical references to use…
…as artefacts in my story.
Sound effects were stock from WeVideo as well as the music was stock music from WeVideo and I went with what was appropriate for the feelings I was attempting to create.
