Telling Lives - digistories

Ten people engaged in the multistory.net workshop have indentified and scripted their stories today. It was a large storycircle but the storyteller all came with some skills. Tomorrow is a complicated day scanning their images and recording their scripts. I normally structure this as a series of appointments but in this case I have find ways of getting them to work unsupervised.

Alexander Solzhenitskyn has died aged 89. Coincidentally I had brought his book August 1914 to read again 30 years after my first largely unsuccesful attempt. Now I feel I must do it justice.

I’ve just watched a totally absorbing perfomance by Roughshod.

Riding Lights Roughshod is a professional touring theatre company - created by Riding Lights in 1992 to concentrate on the grass-roots community touring which characterised the early years of Riding Lights itself - which annually reaches a live audience of around 65,000 adults and children. It has been acclaimed from Belfast to Brixton for creating powerful new pieces of theatre.

Their collection sketches in the show Hope Street are compelling and moving. A mixture of traditional storytelling from biblical, classical and North American sources, mixed with the actors personal stories of hope. I’m at the Riding Lights Summer Theatre School in Harrogate.

This  afternoon we introduced our storytelling groups to the plan for the week. Sarah Rundle warmed everyone up and I explained how they will put the digital into storytelling. We haven’t worked together before but I feel good about the partnership. Sarah is a traditional storyteller and with her our group will develop their performance skills. I am running two slightly squeezed digital storytelling workshops so that everyone can experience both styles of story making.

I’m about to set off for a week long residential where I am running two digital storytelling workshops at the Riding Lights Summer Theatre School.
I am particularly excited about this event because five Palestinian students from Bethlehem will be joining us. A month ago I was cycling round the Yorkshire Dales on a sponsored ride to raise money for their trip here this month. You can read more about that event on my Rising Dawn blog
I hope to be live blogging from the event if I can secure a suitable connection.

Helping families keep in touch - nebusiness.co.uk
The official launch saw five African families take part in a three-day digital storytelling workshop as part of Changing Perspectives – a project which aims to create a multimedia archive to celebrate the heritage of African and Caribbean families living in the North East.
The launch event saw families create their own three-minute films for publication on the programme’s website and will also go forward to be broadcast at a world premiere event during black history month in October.
The workshop involved script writing, voice-over recording, and mastering industry-standard image and video editing production.
Participants used personal stories of their experience from living in both Africa and the North East and pictures from their family photo album.
Peter Adegbie, creator of the Changing Perspectives programme, said: “I am so pleased to launch the new NEEACA building with the Changing Perspectives digital storytelling project as this exemplifies what the new building is all about.
“The stories from the families will be truly inspirational and will give a real insight into their views of being of African descent and their experiences of living in the North East.

Peter Adegbie trained on one of my Train the Trainers courses. It’s good to see the project in the North East getting started … and gaining some publicity too. By the way, this is not related to the other project I am linked to in the North East.

I have just received news of a very extensive digital storytelling project in the North East of England. It could be the largest single funding of digital storytelling in the world so far. More details when I know I can tell you more.

Job in Toronto - murmur hiring

I just spotted this on Gareth Morlais’s blog. What an opportunity to combine a move to Toronto with a fascinating project. I’ve met Shaun several times and I’d love to be available to work on [murmer]

Carers digistories

The stories made in one of my recent workshops have just been published. I introduced them to the audience at the Kirklees Carer of the Year Awards in Huddersfield last week. Now you can watch them here.

Here on the west coast of Wales at the UKs only digital storytelling festival I have connection to the outside world only through my iPhone. Access to the university’s wifi network is denied to all but staff and students, t-mobile supplies no signal to my broadband 3g dongle and the nearest public wifi point is half an hour’s walk away. So my intention of live blogging events here is thwarted. So today we’ll continue to discuss the glorious possibility offered by connectivity, web 2.98, broadband, etc etc and it will remain theory only until I escape on the 7.27 train out of town tomorrow morning. I’ll just have to wait till then to blog from the train and bring these pages up to date on the journey home.
In the mean time I’ll continue to enjoy this festival of ideas and the good company of the delegates.

I am in Aberystwyth after a train journey that was late and then became a coach tour. Regulars on the line from Shrewsbury to the coast didn’t seem to be suprised when the train terminated several stations before the destination.
The coach journey was ultimately more enjoyable. We were closer to the villages and each other too. I had met up with my friend Diane from Arizona on the way and then we met some others on their way to DS3.
By the time we reached Aberystwyth it was so late we stopped in town to eat before going up the hill to the campus. I had a call from Mary Ann who had arranged to meet me over a coffee for chat. After checking in to our rooms I met Mark, a performance poet from Belfast. He is helping 12 year olds with digital storytelling using Movie Maker “because they all have it at home”.
So the community is here and I suppose I’ll make some new friends tomorrow.
I’m writing this on my iPhone because there’s no t-mobile signal up here for my broadband dongle. I hope to find some wireless access tomorrow. Time to sleep.

Carers stories in Huddersfield, memories of The Sixties in York. Just two of the workshops that have kept me busy in the past month. I’ve also written an article about digital storytelling for a writers magazine called Lapidus and now I’m on my way to Aberystwyth for DS3.

I will be blogging from the festival so expect a some new entries here over the next few days. It’s good to get away to listen to what other storytelling practitioners are developing in the digital world and to reflect on my own business. I’ll also be meeting friends and colleagues from previous events and the BBC.

From York it’s a long train journey to West Wales, via Manchester and Shrewsbury. I arrive in Aberystwyth at about 7.30 this evening if all the trains make their connections. So don’t expect too much until tomorrow when the event gets going.