Here are the rest of the questions that Kaseina Dashe from Worcester asked.
3. How do you identify your projects?
4. What challenges do you encounter in carrying out your projects?
5. What are the gaps your practice is trying to fill?
6. How does digital storytelling enhance cultural and community development?
7. How relevant is cultural development to any society?
8. Who are the beneficiaries of the work that you carry out?
9. How do you use digital storytelling in workshops, training sessions, projects and festivals?
10. Do the applications and uses of digital storytelling vary depending on the project? If so, how?
11. What does corporate digital storytelling involve?
12. What do you foresee to be the future of digital storytelling?
13. What value do membership of professional bodies add to your practice?
14. What are the ingredients for a successful digital storytelling practice like yours?
Here are some answers and thoughts.
3. How do you identify your projects?
Usually they come to me. Often it is someone who has identified that they want to do a digital storytelling project and they do an internet search and find me.
Probably more important though is the long term relationships that are built up over time. For example, my relationship with the Inala Elders probably began with meeting Aunt Vi McDermott at a local storytelling festival. We got on well and a number of workshops and community projects later, I'm still developing new projects with Aunty Vi and other Elders from Inala.
Too often the nature of grants and other funding makes this type of long term relationship more challenging but it is the way I would like to work more often.
4. What challenges do you encounter in carrying out your projects?
There is nothing specific about digital storytelling projects here. If one can get the funding in the first place, then the projects aren't difficult. One simply follows good practice and they work out.
5. What are the gaps your practice is trying to fill?
My practice is not trying to do anything. Despite that however, I do think that Digital Storytelling does fill some gaps. Because, as a format, it allows satisfying and effective outcomes with relatively inexpensive technology and process, then it allows much more community and amateur production and distribution then network television or movie making allows.
Digital storytelling allows a wide range of age groups, literacy and technical experience to be digitally creative. The needed technology is available in homes, classrooms and community centres.
6. How does digital storytelling enhance cultural and community development?
I think I've covered this in previous answers but essentially it help ensure that stories are told and published. Telling one's own story is a healing process when it done voluntarily in a supportive environment. Hearing someone tell an important personal story build community bonds and identity. It can bolster our determination to work for social good rather than individual benefit. Identifying our own story in someone elses can help us realise that we are not isolated, our experience is shared. Digital storytelling does all of the above almost as well as non-digital storytelling. It's advantage can be a potentially wider audience.
7. How relevant is cultural development to any society?
Very. Cultural development is an essential counter and contradiction to accumulated distress and uncaring exploitation.
8. Who are the beneficiaries of the work that you carry out?
The people who tell and publish their stories, the people who support and assist the process and the people who listen/watch and think about their stories. Often it is simply enough to know that the project has taken place to gain some benefit. Society as a whole benefits through the community cultural development that takes place.
(I get a lot of benefit myself as well of course and I don't just mean it helps me earn a living.)
9. How do you use digital storytelling in workshops, training sessions, projects and festivals?
I will often find ways of including a digital storytelling variation into projects and workshops. For example, when asked to help students to create stories about their school and suburb in an Artist In Residency project recently I was able to also publish those stories as digital stories on DVD and projected as part of the community exhibition and celebration.
Another example was the Stories and Songs of Boundary Street Project where I worked with local storytellers, musicians and members of a choir to create songs about Boundary Street, West End. These songs were performed on stage, I compered, but also digital story versions were projected on the big LCD screen as part of the West End Live Festival (part of the Festival of Brisbane).
10. Do the applications and uses of digital storytelling vary depending on the project? If so, how?
Yes, of course. See above.
11. What does corporate digital storytelling involve?
The same as community digital storytelling but the outcomes are more usually associated with a training or public communication outcome.
12. What do you foresee to be the future of digital storytelling?
I think that it will continue. Their is a niche for it at the moment and I suspect that their will continue to be a niche for it as long as digital technology is accessable to the community.
What will change will be the technology of the publishing media. I still make use of DVD's as a publishing medium but it maybe that it is replaced with online platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo etc. The creative process will still be digital storytelling however.
13. What value do membership of professional bodies add to your practice?
I think it is valuable but not essential. Membership helps some clients be confident about your professionalism and your integrity but really word of mouth is more important.
14. What are the ingredients for a successful digital storytelling practice like yours?
Integrity, respect, flexibility, being able to listen well and being an experienced spoken word storyteller.
The integrity and respect speak for themselves. Flexibility is an essential component of all community culural development work. Nothing works out exactly as originally planned and neither should it.
Being able to listen well not only enables one to work out what the storyteller is trying to achieve but also encourage them to tell a good story. Good storytellers are also good story listeners because the storyteller is constantly watching and listening to the story and the audience and adapting the story to fit the situation.
Being an experienced oral or spoken word storyteller is important as it allows one to know when a story, or voiceover, is being told well. It enables one to ask the questions that fill the gaps in the story. Authors and playwrites have different storytelling skills that often result in digital stories that are too literary or dramatic for good digital stories.
Thus ends the questions and my answers. Please feel free to contribute via comments or through email (mail@storytell.com.au).
The origina request and response is at http://enchantedmovies.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/riverview-stories-international-request.html . The two other posts are at:
http://enchantedmovies.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/what-does-my-digital-story-practice.html and
http://enchantedmovies.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/what-factors-influence-your-practice.html
Regards
Daryll Bellingham
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