Sunday, March 21, 2010

Great Brisbane Bike Ride















Well done Bicycle Queensland for organising yet another Bike Week and the many cycle events on today. I managed the 45km Great Brisbane Bike ride - yey!

We descended down, down into the Clem7 version of subterranean hell and ascended somewhat more slowly into the fresh on the other side.

What a pleasant change it was to be riding without cars and trucks thundering everywhere. There was just the whirring of bike chains, puffing of riders, the clicking up and down the gears and the pleasant warnings of passing speedsters 'passing right'.

Riding with my friends Bill and Isabelle, I remembered the sort of riding I used to do with my sister and cousins as kids - up to Jolley's Lookout and down the goat track to Highvale and back in through Samford. That was a longish day adventure. No one seemed to mind. Must have been a different universe. Today was too in a way, a bicycle universe.

Bit funny though, I collected my t-shirt and stuff at the Southbank finish line and road home, and, would you believe it, coming up that last hill to our place, my leg muscles finally said, 'Enough!' and they all decided to cramp at once. Took a bit of stretching to persuade them that I wasn't going to ride any more k's, at least not today.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Stories about Digital Stories

Got invited this week by Dr Christina Spurgeon to drop along as guest lecturer to her Digital Stories course at QUT Creative Industries.

I really enjoyed telling students stories about the Digital Stories I've either created or helped create in the various community digital storytelling projects I've organised, co-ordinated and facilitated. Digital Stories are one of the wonders of the digital age. If done well, they help keep the old traditional storytelling skills alive in a low cost digital production way. We had some interesting debates about what was 'Digital Story' and what was 'documentary' or 'interview'.

It's great to interact with students discovering the way in which creating a digital story about one of one's own important stories can be so transforming. Hearing their draft scripts was a real gift.

It will be interesting to see how the Digital Story develops in this digital age. The relatively low cost software like MovieMaker and iMovie and hardware like laptops and digital cameras will keep changing and digital stories will change with them for better or worse.

In the meantime, if you would like to see some Queensland digital stories, you can go to YouTube and do a search for 'queensland storylines' (without the apostrophes). There are even some there that I did. Look out for 'Lucas Papaw Ointment' or 'Growing up with the Princess', for example.