A Journey Through Israel and Jordan

Petra: In front of the famous Treasury building in the lost city of Petra

Have you been on an overseas holiday recently but can hardly remember a thing about it? Well, one technique to remember stories from your holidays about the things you did or places you visited is to capture your holiday in a digital story.

Digital storytelling refers to a short form of digital film-making that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story. It’s easy to create and only basic programs are needed to create the story. To find out how to make your own digital story www.techsoup.org.

My Suburban News Editor, Nicholas O’Sullivan met with adventurer Maureen Harrison who has recently traveled to Israel and Jordan. Ms Harrison has served in short-term mission trips and been on several tours while visiting the eastern nations.

A creative non-fiction digital story was produced to display Ms Harrison’s visit to Israel and Jordan in August. The story sets the scene up by talking about the thousands of real-life stories about wars, kings, great leaders and people that have been passed on to many around the globe.
The journey starts at the Ancient Port of Joppa, Israel’s primary port in the Old Testament times and goes to Beersheba and even the Garden of Gethsemane.

Watch the video and start getting ideas on what digital stories you can start creating, digital stories aren’t limited to just holidays, so get creative!

Read more at My Suburban News - http://www.mysuburbannews.com.au/2012/10/28/a-journey-through-israel-and-jordan-20209016.html#ixzz2AYwdeYZs

Place Based Story Telling & Final Assignment

Why do people find stories about places interesting?

-        

  Because of things that happened there. People connect with theses stories emotionally and create meaning

- They are markers in time that anchor your identity – they do this just by being there, and by staying there – this is why it is important to preserve, not just buildings but environments

-  They have multiple ways of being told – they can embody many different types of meaning and story – so they can continually be retold

So, telling stories about places, is as important about telling stories about family, events, history – because the land remains, the places remain and so they are a visual memory of who you are, and where you come from.

Techniques/Approaches to take when creating a place-based story

1.    
Try to understand why something is there. Reveal the underlying social and economic world behind the landscape or building, what was it created or used for?

2.      Look at a story, or a place from several angles. Think of all the people who were, or are, connected to a place and look at it from their perspective and what it might mean to them. This generates great ideas for storytelling.

3.    
Try and identify a small aspect of a place, or something very specific about it that you can base your story on and tell the bigger story of the place. Everyday objects can often reveal, or tell a bigger story.

4.    
Place the story in the context of something larger. Many people find it difficult to get engaged in a
specific story unless they have a frame of reference. Provide them with one by connecting your story to something they might already know about.

5.    
Maps or contextual images are a way to break through the disconnection with place, if you can’t be physically there. Maps take your eyes and place them above a landscape and help the viewer orient themselves to a location. Good , wide establishing shots serve a similar function.

Examples

The examples I used aren’t meant to be copied, but just show how you can use different devices within a story to help locate the viewer in a place.

Assignment 4

Assignment 4 is to produce a digital story based on your own idea. It can be about anything you like, but it needs to involve some research by you, needs to have a target audience, and needs to be in the digital story format we have been practicing for the other assignments.

Develop a dramatic question, a point and include narration, emotion, pacing, soundtrack and titles.

I want you to include three components:

1. A Covering letter

Write a covering letter that summarises your project for me. Save the document as Your Name_Assignment 4 (a MSWord, Txt or RTF format document or similar). In the covering document I want to see:

1.Your Details

·         Your Name

·         NM 2203 Assignment 4

·         Student ID

2. Title of the Movie

3. Introduction

Introduce to the story, tell me what your objectives are with this piece, what it is you are trying to convey.

Tell me who the intended audience is, what they will take out of this story, or how they will find it useful, or how it will meet their needs.

4. The Process

Tell me about how you went about making this movie. If you had to do a field trip, or an interview, some background research, etc. Tell me about the process and how you established your ideas and why you chose to use the approach you took.

5. Files

Describe the folder structure where you files are located, so someone who had to go and remake or edit your movie could find the files they need.

6. Permissions

Give me an overview of the files/interviews that you used to make the movie, and where you sourced them. Pick a Creative Commons Licence for your movie.

Remember, you get a lot of marks for simply documenting and uploading your assignment correctly. Double-check your spelling and grammar. Get someone to check it for you. It is important.

2. Your Storyboard – in the same format I specified in Assignment 1 – i.e. in columns across the page. Name it ‘Your Name_ Assignment 3 Storyboard’

3. Your Movie file – create a movie file and name it Your Name_Assignment 3. Try to keep the file under 100MB.

It is a good idea to zip up these three files into one Zip Folder and upload that. That means you only need to upload once.

DROPBOX

I will create an Assignment 4 Dropbox on LearnJCU. Upload your files here by Monday 29^th  October.

To recap – upload 3 files for me ( or zip into one folder and upload the folder).

1.    A covering document

2.    Your storyboard
Your Movie file

Have fun.

What's Your Motivation?

This was a Digital Photo Story created for the Digital Story Telling subject at JCU known as NM2203.

The story produced was written to a criteria, with the purpose of teaching somebody something through the use of a digital story, in the hope that they they might possibly learn something from it.

Music used and licensed under the Creative Commons license by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com. All images are owned solely by @nickswebtsv.

Story Transcript

I was the kid who never liked the idea of competing.

I dreaded the yearly school sports activities, such as the cross country the athletics day and God forbid that dreaded swimming carnival.

You can probably see I wasn’t really the athletic type, until one day, that day I decided to step up to the mark.

It all happened after a long summer’s break of mountain biking and weight-lifting.

I spoke highly of myself with my newly found personal confidence after suggesting how many tonne of weights I used to lift each afternoon.

I was told I should do the cross-country and prove it! So, I stepped up to the challenge and competed, scoring a top 10 finish and in-turn making the school cross country team. I also found something inside myself that day.

From that point on, I became known as ‘the machine’ at school and home.

Years went by and I continued to improve my athletic endurance, both in running, cycling and occasionally the swimming discipline.

I entered myself into my first triathlon in ‘08 and scored another top-10 finish in my chosen class.  

Since then I’ve been hooked on continually improving my performance in my chose sporting discipline; triathlons.

I train more than 10 hours a week with most days starting as early as 4am. You might ask why I do this? Well, I love competing to continually prove to myself I can be successful. It’s a great motivational tool.

So I leave you with this, What’s your motivation?

Introduction to Digital Storytelling

Stories are created to transmit some sort of value or idea.

1.      The Point. What is the point of your story? Does it have a clear message that you can summarise in one sentence? It might be a moral of the story, or something you learned, or some value or message you want to convey to the viewer. Make sure you can articulate this.

2.      The Dramatic Question. Engage the viewer by posing a question, or a problem to be solved or some unresolved mystery that you can answer during the story. You need to give the viewer a reason to keep watching, they need to wonder what is going to happen here.

3.      Emotional content. By telling a truthful and honest story, where you describe a change in your life that affected you, you will engage the viewer emotionally. Also, by placing them in the scene, describing a scene visually or using words actually used in a scene, they will empathise with the story by visualizing it for themselves.

4.      Your Voice. Your voice, and your ability to use it to tell a story is a crucial element in this form of storytelling.

5.      Soundtrack. Soundtrack can set the tone for a story and can also be used to emphasise emotional content in scenes. Start thinking about the types of soundtrack available to you.

6.      Economy. Less is more. Let your pictures and words compliment each other, allow the viewer to connect the dots, don’t spell it out for them by describing what they are seeing.

7.      Pacing. Change pace to create drama. Slow for reflective, sad, contemplative; fast for action, tension and surprise.