Gareth Morlais asks: ‘One-hour digital storytelling?’

Whilst I was staying in Cardiff, I met up with Gareth Morlais at the BBC. Gareth was one of the BBC Cymru Wales Capture Wales Digital Storytelling team and showed me some of the many digital stories he’s seen and helped people to create during project workshops, from  Daniel Meadows’ touchingly personal Polyphoto to powerful reporting of experiences of bigger news stories, such as Paula Symon’s There is nothing more frightening than Active Ignorance.

Whilst we were talking Gareth wondered aloud if it might be possible to create and produce some much shorter and simpler digital stories over a StoryCamp session. Gareth showed me how he has helped people create some incredibly moving Shoebox Stories with as little as a single object or picture in the case of Samiya’s My Picture.

This led Gareth to ponder:

Is there a form of digital storytelling that can give people a taste of what’s possible in just one hour?…

Nicky and I began by looking back at the Capture Wales project, then we wondered about what kinds of video outputs might be produced at the Ludlow #Storycamp. The model we’re considering piloting consists of:

• four images, including titles;
• half a minute of audio, recorded on mobile phone in a quiet room;
• a personal anecdote based on one image or object related to ‘my special place’

We’re confident the technical building of the digital story can be done within the time, as long as not much training is required. But we’re both concerned that there’s not enough time to give the anecdote (mini personal story about a place) time to ‘breathe’.

But we want to try, so if you fancy taking part in the challenge, here’s what you need to bring to create a short digital story about your local area:

• A photo (physical or digital copy) or small object that you feel defines your area and says something about what makes it an extra special place.

That’s it! If you’ve a photo in mind, it would be great if you could post it onto Flickr prior to StoryCamp but if you can’t that’s fine, we’ll work around it. If you’re after some inspiration try searching Flickr’s creative commons for something suitable.

This is the first session suggestion for StoryCamp so I’ll also be posting it on the StoryCamp Posterous group, where there’ll hopefully be some more suggestions and ideas posted by your good selves over the next couple of weeks!