Glossophobia and the Rabbit: A Personal Digital Story
Reflective Essay on Production
The most difficult part of digital storytelling for me was coming up with a story to tell. Nothing came to mind for me that fit the assignment well — the keywords were that is be personal, connected to the audience, and with a dramatic arc. I am a person who does not generally tell others personal stories about myself. I also prefer a lack of drama in my life! I do have a few dramatic personal stories that are painful to recall, and I did not want to explore these. So. I thought about stories that I tell in my teaching — these typically illustrate concepts that I am covering. I teach a lot of public speaking, and I enjoy it, and I often tell a story about my own personal fear of speaking, a story I tell semester after semester. I thought that making a digital artifact of this story that I can use in class would be useful! In Seelig’s (2017) schema of creativity, this was the Imagination stage: envisioning something that does not yet exist.
I began by I making a storyboard. I wrote my story and broke it into sections. Then, I wrote down ideas for visuals and animations for each portion. Finally, I collected many images that matched what I had envisioned. In Seelig’s scheme, this was the Creativity step: applying imagination to address the challenge. This was the most enjoyable part of the project.
The second difficult thing was making what I imagined happen. I envisioned animation (long before our class lesson) in the form of moving text and images. I have almost zero experience with this, and therefore I searched online and watched videos for several different programs. I attempted first to use an Adobe tool, but it became frustrating, and my vision was not coming together. I finally settled on doing a PowerPoint screencast. I have used limited animation in this tool, but never with a voice-over in an almost-video like format. Therefore, I did stretch my technical skills. Although my final product was much less “animated” than I would have liked, I am satisfied with the result. This illustrates Seelig’s step of Innovation — applying creativity to generate solutions.
Finally, I had to do a number of takes to get my vocals right, and to get the audio and animation timed correctly. This required by far the most time — take after re-take, adjustments in fractions of seconds! In Seelig’s scheme this step could be Entrepreneurship: applying innovation to inspire others. I hope that my final project has some aspect of this inspiration for the viewers.
Seelig, T. (2017) Creativity Rules. HarperCollins.
