Learning to Tell My Personal Love Story
My digital story is twenty-two years in the making. Over the last three weeks I have been steadily gaining confidence, learning to trust in myself, and understanding what seems to be my responsibility to leave a family legacy through storytelling. This short reflective essay describes my path through the creative production process of making a digital story. Along the way there were many invaluable creative lessons I’ve learned to tell my audience about an important life story when I first met the love of my life.
The first lesson I’ve learned is that free choice in creating a digital story in narrative storytelling format is very challenging and that’s what I experienced as I sifted through all the possibilities to begin my digital storytelling journey. I soon realized that I needed to listen to others telling their own stories in digital spaces so I listened to podcasts and youtube episodes in storytelling formats such as The Moth and Heavyweight. I then read my course texts and additional resources like the Digital Storytelling Cookbook (2010). It was at this point I decided I needed to get really personal and brave. I chose to follow the creative production process as documented by Lambert (2010) in the cookbook. Now all I needed to do was get outside of my comfort zone of consumption and into the creative kitchen. As mentioned by Micha Buzan, it was time to examine my day with a critical eye and make time to make it. I needed these words to get started and take that leap!
From here on my mind was committed to telling my personal love story that I share with my wife. Our wedding anniversary is also coming up so what better than to create a gift for her as well. I chose this story after thinking long and hard about what a dramatic arc meant. My story had the potential to evoke emotion because of a particular pivotal moment where we almost lost touch shortly after meeting due to a very unpredictable event. (No spoiler alerts here — you have to watch the video to get the details.) Once the decision was made to go with this story I learned to stay committed and trust that I would recall the details well enough to retell it.
After two week’s worth of gathering, thinking and preparing I was ready to get started just as my readings had suggested. Here I needed to correct my path because initially I started the story before looking at the bigger picture. I realized I lacked structure so I stepped away for a few days. I then realized I needed to According to Hobbs (2017) in the Create to Learn text, good structure can make the difference between good creative work and great creative work. My aim was to create a sound structure by creating a storyboard with written notes along with potential pictures that would give me a frame by frame path to my story. I decided to lay it all out on a large poster board and create that bigger frame of reference.
Retrospectively, I’ve realized how important storyboarding is to seeing the scope of the work. I learned that persistence towards production time was huge considering my competing priorities in life. I learned that getting back in the “kitchen” to work on it each day was half the battle. I found it really enjoyable to cook it up, write the script, rewrite the script, record the voice-over and dig through old pictures and letters was the most enjoyable part. I’ve even learned how to write differently and more succinctly using this narrative storytelling process.
References:
[Micah Buzan]. Creativity is Risky (Creative Theory) [Video]. Micah Buzan ANIMATION. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFBeHfSNs_c
Hobbs, R. (2017), Create to Learn. Malden: Wiley Blackwell.
Lambert, J. (2010). Digital Storytelling Cookbook. Center for Digital Storytelling.
