Show on the bus
There was a golden moment on the bus ride back to KQED. A large man wearing a yellow vest top and tight bright green shorts got onto the bus somewhere in the Castro area. He sat next to a woman he appeared to know. The conversation was loud, camp and entertaining. He'd just been watching the British TV series
Keeping Up Appearances on cable. His female friend asked if that was the one set in a store. "No, that's
Are You Being Served? but I like that one too." I could have been in London except conversations on the red buses are more rare!
I used the buses frequently in San Francisco and even purchased a seven day pass, inviting predictable comments about Barrie getting his bus pass!
California Dreaming
I look out across San Francisco Bay from the Golden Gate Bridge. I am in the saddle of a rented bike on a sunny day in California. It's Sunday and the crowds are out to see an air display by the Blue Angels. I've escaped the festival for a few hours to see the bridge. The context exhilarates me and I sing California Dreaming as the pedals turn beneath me. The leaves are not brown nor the skies grey, but this could be a dream. The first time in any beautiful location has a dreamlike effect. "Am I really here?". My memory flips back to
The Grand Canyon last year. I wasn't sure how I was going to travel to the Golden Gate. I took the 33 bus from 16th and Bryant near KQED. It wound it's way over the Twin Peaks along Haight, past the notorious junction with Ashbury to the Golden Gate Park. I found a cycle shop and within a few minutes I was at the start of a ten mile circular ride which would take me across the GG Bridge and back.
I had toyed with the idea of bringing my folding bike with me on this trip but the thought of the "Streets of San Francisco" had put me off. But there were cyclists everywhere. It wasn't all steep hills, freeways and nose to tail traffic. In the saddle I was free to explore and I wasn't alone. It was a good afternoon ride but I admit to missing the start of Joe Lambert's first session at the Festival as a result.
Telling Stories, Taking Action
Described as a Feature Presentation by
Natasha Freidus and
Thaddeus Miles -a curated look at excellent works in community building
Mass Impact - Community Building - Self Expression and Healing
What makes good community building? What makes good multimedia?
Answer: Story.
- How do we use the stories we have made to make change?
- How do we integrate stories into social justice work
- How can we institutionalise training and distribution.
Renee's story - a digital story - was shown.
It was about addiction, the story of one individual - but it was also a call to action - in this case to vote for change.
- How do we move from being emotionally touched to taking action?
Targeted venues
Material/resources
Clear action steps
Bohille's Story is about a South African man who is HIV positive - to be used in Education. Produced by the Amy Hill Centre for Digital Storytelling it demonstrates effectively that your choices are your future
Thaddeus Miles spoke in a direct no nonsense style.
"Look around at your neighbours - Who's not here of the people you serve?"
Where do we need to go and which conversations do we need to have - lessons to learn from those who are doing it - mainly not in the US.
He said he walked around San Francisco as a photographer and all he could see was the homelessness - amongst all the great architecture the homeless people were all he could photograph. What are their stories?
Help funders understand what digital storytelling can do. How to dream a good dream and to understand their past history. There should be a digital storytelling institute in every state. How do you reach out to people in the communities who build homes to understand DS and to engage people in it?
Thaddeus is also President of the National Consortium for Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands. How does he get us into the communities that others are afraid to go into? How do we interact with them? It's not a technological gap - they have the latest. It's a sociological gap - fear. Look more at diversity.
These are bullet points from his presentation
- Distribution
- National
- Media that matters film festival
- Community based efforts
- Telling Our Legacies Digitally
- Giving out CDs of stories about domestic violence
- Documenting impact
- Students could be helping us to document
- How can we use digital storytelling to help the victims of trauma - e.g. Katrina
Access to all - giving people with disabilities access to the technology.
How do we present to people with disabilities - do we know the guidelines?
Drifting in Antarctica was shown- a film made at MOMI by/for deaf people. Made at MOMI
________________________________
Over coffee afterwards we were discussing the issues this presentation had thrown up - particularly about approach.
- Should we go and do digital storytelling to marginalised communities - won't that simply confirm their marginal status?
- Shouldn't we run workshops for the whole community - so that it can discover its unity.
Winning Hearts
This was a panel presentation moderated by
J.D. LasicaPanel Participants: Josh Goldman, Richard Prelinger, Ezra Cooperstein, John W. Higgins
- Digital Storytelling remains the best-kept secret in the media world. But new channels from Internet television to the Web to traditional cable offer a chance for digital storytelling to break through into the mainstream. Here's how to get visibility for your work.
JD introduced the
Ourmedia.org site where any story can be stored with free bandwidth for ever. He was disappointed that there are only 15 digital stories out of 45 thousand works on the site. He is keen to work with storytellers to source more material
Much of the early discussion was about re-versioning existing work in new films.
Richard Prelinger has an internet archive - the
Prelinger Archives. Digital artists can download free archive footage while supplies to broadcast and commercial market are charged. He sees the potential to break the distribution gap. Serving the needs of independents. In this way work won't go out of print - others can take it and remix it, edit and reuse, it becomes part of the cultural fabric.
The principle of a
Creative Commons was explained. It gives flexibility to the use of copyright material. The site is worth reading but it's still a difficult area.
Josh Goldman introduced the
Akimbo Set Top Box. It downloads digital material in downtime and presents it on demand through a menu. A way of organising video blogs - similar to what iTunes can do for Podcasts. Bringing non mainstream digital content to the television
The digital set top box linked to the internet. Assets downloaded and stored on the hard drive in the set top box. Justin list of recently downloaded Video Blogs, digital stories, (including JD who appears in three contributions to the service.) Josh showed us a Steve and Carol Show - Beer Tasting.
There over 5,000 shows on the service which supplies a combination of personal and commercial programming - TCM is one of the major providers. Vlogs appear listed beside Discovery Channel.
John W. HigginsPublic Access Media projects.
Handout - on website as .pdf
Ezra Cooperstein talked about
current.tv Al Gore created this cable channel to offer anyone the opportunity to make their own TV. About 25% of the content is contributed, but would like it to be more.
Final discussion.
At the end the questions returned to issues about copyright. I don't think my view has changed since last year - one reinforced by
Daniel Meadows at the start of the festival. Why do we need to rip off material from other people when we can create and make our own?
Neighbourhood narratives
More situated storytelling.
Hana Iverson introduced Neighbourhood Narratives from a project in the Eldridge Street Synagogue in the Lower East Side, New York. It became the place for an installation called
View from the BalconyShe described her work with Jewish women, "My story is more Life in the Fragment. Dealing with layers of the community."
From the website.
The central motif of the video presentation at the Eldridge Street Synagogue is the gesture of mending. Sewing is a traditional female task, and here acts as a metaphor related to rifts and healing.Hana is part of the Faculty at
Temple University - where students are producing narratives tracking their lives through the city.
Nick West introduced Digital Geographies - the same meaning as Mediascapes.
He suggested they stretch definition of story and stretch boundary of the city to find out what it becomes when we participate in it.
He explained
Urban Tapestries. In one example "stickies" were given to people in the city to make comments on a place and then to stick them on the map.
What people said:
- I was here
- Architectural comments
- History and other tours
- Messages to friends
- Stories
- Some were WAY miscellaneous. e.g. One woman identified all the places she had fights with her boyfriend!
Creating a story commons
Discovery
We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our knowing
shall be to arrive where we started
and know it for the first time.
TS Elliott
Thank you Natalie and Leslie who gave me this quote on separate occasions.
Situated Storytelling
The presenters were Abbe Don, Jo Reid, Hana Iverson, Nick West
You can read their
biographies here.
"In our culture we have moved the stories from the place where they occur into the living room - TV Internet Video"
Creating stories in the place where they occur requires the development of mobile social software. Something called psycho geography has also been devised as a new way of exploring an urban environment
Nick West from HP Labs Bristol explained the Scape the Hood Mediascape. Stories had been gathered from the locality around KQED in San Francisco and saved them as audiofiles on an iPAQ. The file also contains the coordinates of each story's origin. The iPAQ determines the location of the user and plays out the story relevant to that space. I have used the same set up in an earlier demonstration in Bristol.
The software can be downloaded for non commercial use from the
Mobile Bristol site
people attending the festival could go out with a holster slung around their body holding an iPAQ and small Bluetooth GPS receiver to experience the mediascape called Scape the Hood.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported the experiment.Jo Reid - also of HP Bristol introduced another project but this time built around one historic event - The Queens Square Riots of 1831. In this case the audio files are dramatic productions of the conversations from the riot. There's a page on the
Mobile Bristol Site which explains it.
Jo also talked about applications for games, festival and event information and the use of 3D spatialised sound.
As a storytelling environment the frame work is not linear and relies on finding Magic Moments when the user/listener is surprised buy the juxtaposition of the audio and the environment triggered simply by walking into a location. They are the moments of revelation that people remember.
So how does situated storytelling for Mediascapes compare with what we know as digital storytelling?
Digital / Situated storytelling
Personal / Stimulated by environment
For PC consumption / Mobile consumption
Quiet / Noisy
Dedicated attention / Many distractions
Reflective / Seeing with eyes of others
Thoughtful / "Throw away" - work fast
/ Physical sense - smells and movement.
Good food - Osha Thai
Between the afternoon and evenings sessions - and a few of us wanted to be back for the Apple presentation - we found the fabulous
Osha Thai restaurant in the Mission distract. Good food, delivered quickly with the kind of service only found in the US.
It's on Valencia south of the junction with 18th Street. Worth a visit. Good company too. We were late for the Apple Presentation! Sorry Bill.
Multimedia Sonnets from the people
Daniel Meadows or Dr Dan, as he now is since he presented his years of experience in digital storytelling for his PhD, inspired us all with his keynote speech at the Festival on Saturday morning.
He began in serious mood and at the start seemed less optimistic about digital storytelling. None of the jokes and light hearted stories that marked his presentation last year. The doctor was in diagnostic mode. "I am a photographer trying to look into the future, which I find difficult because photographs are always in the past." Echoes of his philosophical digital story
Scissors. "The photograph album is time's coffin with a glass lid." But he was certainly not putting the movement into an early grave even if the BBC was poised to write the obituary of an interesting experiment for which TV Editors could find little enthusiasm. The BBC Telling Lives digital storytelling project has been closed and Daniel himself will return to teaching next year when his attachment with the BBC ends leaving a smaller Capture Wales team to wave the flag.
He challenged the festival to move beyond the confessional style of storytelling, done for its own sake. To consider the finer demands of making digital stories for the mass media. A series of
digital stories made in Wales were shown to illustrate his points. The story of a boy and his dog which had to be remade to omit a reference to a park he visited regularly; a girl looking for her father who may have been prey to impostors with ill intent. The stories were glowing examples of "multi media sonnets from the people". They drew us in and helped us to understand, to glimpse behind the curtains of their personal space. But not everyone out there has integrity, many mean harm, some cause it inadvertently.
"It's not just personal therapy, getting something off your chest." There are responsibilities attached to storytelling and we have things to learn from the professional gatekeepers of the media. Editorial issues are important. Sometimes though, they are just too fussy or even prejudiced. A riveting story made by a woman who is blind was almost rejected for broadcast because the first image was held for too long.
Daniel challenged us, "Shame those who wish to keep the medium to themselves. Not by prising their dead hands off the tiller, but by making good and compelling digital stories." I've worked with Dan and I know how he agonises over each story.
He also made us examine the integrity of our stories. We have creative responsibilities. "Never borrow emotional content from elsewhere." If we don't have the material we should make it rather than use someone else's pictures and music.
He did make us laugh with a satirical look at big media trying embrace citizen media. The hypocritical concern about maintaining standards whilst at the same time broadcasting gung ho coverage of the Iraq War. "Up yours," Dr Dan retorted.
He concluded with an optimistic challenge and a little wisdom inherited from his mother. "Not all big media producers are witless baboons. Change will come. Softly softly catchy monkey."
Again we were inspired by the integrity and thoughtfulness of
Daniel Meadows. It was fitting, and in the tone of the festival, that he was welcomed into the Digital Geezers Club during a short presentation at the end of his speech. Dr Dan - Digital Geezer.
Nine films
At four thirty today we showed nine films that had been created in the first workshop of the festival. In the last day some of the participants worked with real intensity to turn their story into a film.
Daniel and I commented afterwards on the difference between this workshop and the ones we were used to running in the UK. In general there was a lower level of preparedness among the participants here. Some arrived with no images relevant to their stories - so we had to spend more time creating pictures for their films in the workshop.
Thankfully some of them were highly skilled and organised. They offered a lot of assistance to others in the workshop - in some cases rescuing their fellow storytellers from potential despair.
iMovie proved to be an idiosyncratic piece of software. The process of digital storytelling showed up a number of bugs that may appear much less often when editing home movies. The greatest frustration is the unpredictable movement of clips on the timeline when single images are removed or added. Daniel went to great lengths to explain tricks to maintain the relative position of the clips and sound track, but we both experienced times when the clips upstream from the playhead (cursor) were pushed or dragged out of sync despite following the correct routine.
The integration between the iLife programs makes the organisation of assets simple, but the options for modifying those assets is limited. For example, The Ken Burns zooms are simple but with limited control I found the effect predictable and unsatisfying.
Despite these limitations and frustrations, each participant went away with their own story on CD-Rom. Some of them very moving, and all of them a real achievement.
As ever each person changed my life as I was privileged to share their story reliving a few steps of the journey that led them to San Francisco this week. There were tears, hugs and lots of laughter. Thanks guys - you were great.
Bootcamp
The venue for the
Digital Storytelling Festival in 2005 is
KQED the Public Service Broadcaster in San Francisco. I arrived at the studios on Mariposa Street on Tuesday afternoon to help set up the digi lab for the pre festival bootcamp or workshop as we British prefer to call these events.
Lesley and Daniel were there too and between us we completed just about everything before had to vacate the room. The workshop started on Wednesday at 9am.
This workshop was being taught using iLife 5 on Apple iBook Laptops with Sound Studio 2.2.4. for audio recording. Using iPhoto and iMovie 5HD for digital storytelling is a new experience for me. I am more used to Adobe Premiere 6.5 or Final Cut Express. I'll reserve judgement on my experience until it is over.
There are nine participants and each one is learning new skills through telling their own story.
