Digital Storytelling — Unplanned Soloing at Purgatory Chasm

Reflecting on digital storytelling

This project was excellent and provided opportunities for learning on multiple levels. Each step of the process required significant planning and deliberate decision making. This started with deciding what story to tell, which was an iterative process with the decisions of how to arrange the elements of the story. Then selecting the technology and platforms that best supported those decisions, or maybe were close enough to be usable. This decision inadvertently placed constraints on later audio decisions. Finally, the cherry on top was that the time spent reflecting on this particular story led to more lessons that I had originally gathered from the events.

I started this project by choosing a story. I had a few categories that I had planned to choose from, which included SCUBA diving, rock climbing and teaching. Looking at about three options from each of the categories, I settled on a story that described a dangerous situation which I had put myself in while rock climbing. This decision was based on several factors, first, the story provided the most dramatic events of the options I was considering. It is an extremely personal story, in fact I am the only character in the story, and was possibly the only person even close to the events. The personal nature of the story completely aligns with Hobbes’ (2017) comment that this will make the story more “universal” and relatable (124) It was also a story from which I had already garnered several lessons, not just about rock climbing, but about decision making in general. This was an added bonus, because I have a lot of experience teaching decision making, and this story tied two of my topics together. A final realization about this story is that despite the explicit decision-making lessons I had gained from the experience, I was surprised that I had never included it as an example in one of my decision-making courses.

Having selected the story, I began to try to organize my thoughts. I began by sketching the climb as I remembered it. This was a very useful approach because the physical characteristics of the rock cliff provided natural trajectories of the dramatic arc of the story. It also led me to the decision to attempt a whiteboard animation to accompany the story. During the process of capturing this story, I drove back to the scene, and hiked around the climbing area looking for where it had actually occurred. Surprisingly, or maybe not, none of the cliffs completely aligned with what I remembered. I did find what I believe to be where the climb took place, but this completely reinforced one of the lessons I describe in the story, because the danger of climbing down that I perceived does not appear to exist in reality. At this point I had what I thought was a good outline, and I created a storyboard adapted from the example provided by Lambert (2010).

While completing the storyboard, and following the process described by Lambert, I began to think about background music for the story. I honestly had not considered including background music prior to reading the cookbook, but I immediately knew that I needed to change the music at a few key points along the climb, in order to increase the tension in the middle of the dilemma. I also considered stopping the music at the end of the climbing portion of the story, but ultimately decided to finish with a calmer piece of music that could help the listener wind down after the dramatic conclusion, but I still didn’t know exactly what music I would include.

Finally, I began exploring the technology that I would use to create the final product. I experimented with Animatron and was able to figure out the basics quickly and settled on this for my whiteboard animation. I also knew that I would need a video editor, and used the Clipchamp the editor which was installed on my laptop when I purchased it. This turned out to be very easy to use, and allowed me to manipulate video and audio in a convenient way that mimicked my storyboard. I also used PowerPoint to insert additional graphics and my voiceover. After several attempts, I had a workable video with voiceover and just needed to add the background music in Climpchamp. At this point my choice of technology impacted my selections, because I elected to limit my search to the free music resident in Clipchamp, which provided music that did exactly what I intended.

I include at the end of the video the lessons I learned, but also that I continue to learn from this story. I became even more aware of what the first right decision should have been while I was climbing, and was reminded again of other lessons. My decision-making lessons were reinforced by retelling this story, and my storytelling process and my digital skills were both enhanced by this project. I hope you enjoy the video available at this link, https://youtu.be/JXXcKpgjihc.

Cheers.

References

Hobbs, R. (2017). Create to Learn: Introduction to Digital Literacy. New York: Wiley.

Lambert, J. (2010). Digital Storytelling Cookbook. Center for Digital Storytelling.