Digital Storytelling at ACMI

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)

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