Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Qld Stories Digital Storytelling Projects

In amongst my regular storytelling performances in kindergartens, preschools and schools I've been helping to organise a couple of community cultural development Digital Storytelling projects in local libraries. They've been funded by State Library of Queensland - Queensland Stories Grants.

The first one is with the Brisbane City Council and is being run at their Chermside Branch Library. It will be following up on some multimedia workshops for young people previously run by SpeakOut at the library. We'll be working with young people in the area to combine their multimedia skills with rap and hip hop and digital storytelling.



There are still some spots in our participant group so, if you, or someone you know in the Chermside, Wavell Heights, Zillmere, Aspley area, is interested send me an email and we'll introduce you to the group and the wonderful world of digital storytelling with a cool rap beat.

The second project is 'Loving Logan - Adapting to a New City' being run, of course, by Logan City Library in association with MultiLink at Woodridge and SpeakOut. There are quite a range of community cultural groups and individuals interested in telling their individual and group stories digitally and in acquiring some community multimedia skills along the way. The first meeting with the community groups was really exciting and I'm looking forward to getting together again and getting into the stories.

Friday, July 08, 2005

Digital Storytelling at ACMI

Printing out our movie pics at the front of the booth in the ACMI foyer.













I've had the pleasure of completing one of ACMI's (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) public digital storytelling workshops - three days and a night of work in their digital lab in the bowels of their Federation Square building with a really interesting group of participants, staff and volunteers.

ACMI is very organised with their Digital Storytelling courses. It was a pleasure to be see a lab full of Macs to work on (30 all told), scanners, sound recording booths - all networked for easy transfer of files. We all ended the weekend with a digital story on a DVD. Mine was an 'appreciation' of our trips down the Newell Highway to Deniliquin called 'Southern Migration'. You can do the trip south with me from here. (1.3 meg QT movie)

Newell Highway creek sign - Little Bumble Creek
Mural on side of a Mendooran shop.

Other people had addressed quite serious subjects through the process.The potential of digital storytelling as both personal and community cultural development tools is really obvious. Good training is important however and the ACMI certainly provided that.

I also enjoyed learning some new software (well new for me) - Adobe Premier. It has some interesting little quirks but is basically very good - quite user friendly. It's a good step up from iMovie with it's limitation on only one video track. ACMI had a good selection of their Digital Storytelling collection on display in the Memory Grid. It's a good opportunity to see some great examples which have come out of public workshops and community projects. You can find more information on their web site - http://www.acmi.net.au/digital_storytelling.jsp