First Person
first person > speakers
This year I have worked in San Francisco and New Jersey. Next year I am in Melbourne for First Person - a digital storytelling conference at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. I will be drawing on my experience in the BBC to address the conference theme - "first person".
Digital stories differ in many ways from conventional TV storytelling - and one of the most important is the personal narrative - people finding their own voice. They craft the digital story to transform the germ of a story into a two minute piece of television, remaining in control of the editorial decisions throughout the process. In the BBC Telling Lives project about 350 people learned the skills of digital storytelling and made a film. They are all on the BBC site - Telling Lives.
posted by Dawnriser @ 10:07 PM
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Hi Barrie,
thought it time I re-visted your blog and I felt the need to comment on this post. The idea of first person narrative as a powerful way to explore "issues of social justice, community building and social memory" has always interested me, in part through my work on holocaust stories, and also in my belief that the stories we tell, re-tell, and carry, are embed deeply within us, shaping us and our responses to the world. And we engage with them more easily and readily than 'facts'. One of the strengths and beauties (in my mind) of the digital storytelling I learned from you and Daniel is that the digital medium be kept to a minimun. Perhaps a better way of saying that what I learned from you both is that the work be about the story, and the digital medium offers another way to tell it (one perhaps many more people today are 'trained'/'used to' engaging with in order to receive their stories).
In musing on this I am remided of the pure 'scrapbook aesthetic' form that you and Daniel advocate.
This seems to me to be a very [positive? intuitive? conscious?] response to/focus on using the media at our fingers tips as a medium, rather than the message, and allowing it to overshadow the knowledge - which is engrained/is the story itself.
Seems suddenly even more special as you and Daniel do this given you have spent your lives in the 'media' at BBC etc.
I sense your focii on the story, the personal story, offers the authenticity and longevity that the digital medium has the capacity to display, yet at times, does not as we get sucked into the 'medium as the message' vortex where we obsess about the means to transport information rather than the message it was built with the intention to carry.
[At best?], the digital medium offers a way to transport our personal stories, tales that embed/are born of collective and personal memory, to a wider audience, in a virtually timeless space (they can log on anywhere, anytime).
I wonder now if the work that we felt 'questionable' at the festival was for the synthetic nature, the dullness of information poured into and feed through medium, rather than an authentic personal story - powerful, told in first person, using one of the greatest powers we have: our voice; language.
Indeed, stories are what we all know and respond to.
And here a quote emerges "the universe is made of stories, not of atoms" Muriel Rukeyser
With light and expansive thoughts,
Natalie
PS Yes yes a bit of a stream of consciousness, hope it is (somewhat) clear.
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