So I have had the opportunity in two of my classes to dabble in digital storytelling. 'Back in the day,' I used to love messing around in movie maker and creating little videos for English class or working on larger projects such as our high school grad video and a wedding slide show.
My most recent project started with me brainstorming an idea for a children's story for my ELA methods class. Every idea I had seemed generic and forced. No natural flow whatsoever. Dealing with copyright and creative commons makes me nervous, so as a time saver, I turned to my own pictures. Here is where I found mountains of pictures categorized into makeshift folders/albums. I have always meant to make scrapbooks from my old pictures- or at least hard copy albums. I love nostalgia and really enjoy looking through old pictures. I stared for a while at my copious cats photos and thought about how I could turn them into a story. That's when the simplicity dawned on me. I could just tell the true story of my recent trip with Habitat for Humanity to Honduras. I was immediately engrossed in the process. At moments, the memories made me a little bit misty. I loved taking time to revisit my thought processes when making the short film. I think digital stories are a great way to consolidate old memories and store them for future trips down memory lane.
The downside to becoming so entangled in the process was that my original video was 3 minutes too long and my final copy was a minute and a half over time. I did not use the story board process as I should have, because I had already lived the story. The result of my poor time management left me with a video that I did not have the heart to trim down to meet the criteria of the assignment; however, the assignment gave me that nudge I need to finish these projects that, although meaning a lot to me, I had completely forgot about.
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