COETAIL Course 3, Reflection 4

Digital Storytelling

Firstly, here is the video.

It was my idea to grab audio from a recent interview I had heard to form the basis for our digital story-telling project. The audio is from a DemocracyNow interview conducted by Amy Goodman of master story-teller, folk-singer and activist Utah Phillips. Great, so we had a good solid story, saving us lots of work right?

Well the next step was quite time consuming, gathering the related images. Each team member took a separate concept or segment and began Googling for images. I would like to say that we omitted the whole Creative Commons and giving credit routine because we ran out of time, but it was a consensus right from the beginning that we were skipping that. Theoretically, we know how to do that already, so that is an academic point.

Next we got to the bottleneck. Our resident iMovie expert, Patience, brought all the stills into iMovieHD (the old iMovie) and began adjusting the length of the stills to match the audio. There was no way we could figure to really break this step down into something we could all contribute to. The sound is about 3 and a half minutes and we made it about 3/4 of the way through.

The project was then redone from the stills with a few new images added. I forced myself to use the newer iMovie09. For this kind of thing the 'precision editor' is awesome and, oddly enough, so is the audio scrubbing. Audio scrubbing is on by default and it is one of the first things you want to learn how to turn of when you make the transition from HD to 09.

Two things really stood out to me about this experience. It takes longer than I thought it would. I wonder if I will get used to it or if it is subject to Hoffstader's Law, which states:

It always takes longer than you think it will, even when you take Hoffstader's Law into account.

Seriously though, the time it takes is worth it because the sum is greater than the parts. The story is more compelling when told in this way and it is enormously satisfying to finish one off. I am glad I redid the project.