What factors influence your practice?

Many things influence my digital story practice.

Beliefs
We all tell stories and basically need to tell our own personal stories for our personal and our community well being.

People choose their own level of safety and will tell the stories that they feel safe to tell under the circumstances.

One of the ways that people are oppressed or controlLed is to prevent them telling the stories they want to tell. A good example of this is the way that Aboriginal people were regulated by the Controller of Aborigines under the Act in the first two thirds of the C20.

Part of my practice as a community cultural development artist is to help people tell the stories they need to tell.

I also believe that the process of collecting, editing, rehearsing, recording etc of digital stories is at least as important if not more important than the outcomes.

So an important part of my practice is respect.

Outcomes
The first important step in process is to help people work out their desired outcomes. Once they and I clearly know that then we can work out the best way to achieve it.

For example, if a group of Indigenous Elders want to publish their life stories so that the next generation and the community I general will know what they went through and they want to do it fairly quickly, then a digital story project may well be the best thing to do.

However if a groups wants to encourage other cultural groups to share with them I their own centre then a 'Stories and Songs of ... Project' might be best.

Digital Storytelling Process
The Digital Storytelling process itself has quite an influence on my practice. So, because digital stories work best when the visual elements compliment and support the voice over, it makes sense to create the voice over first.

For a lot of the people I work with, it doesn't help a lot to create a script to read from or learn. So usually I talk with my storyteller and say something like, "What things are you going to include in your story?"

Some times I might make a suggestion or two about things to leave out or add or change around but really, we'll start recording a voice over. We'll often have some important still images in mind as we do this. Often one of my jobs will be to find other imagery and to suggest if some video footage might be appropriate.

If you are a refugee, for example, you are unlikely to have photos of your refugee journey. People usually don't have photos of their workplace although there will be some school photos and often family event photos. These all have an influence.

Celebration and evaluation
One of the biggest influence is the celebration of a successful project. The launch of the Yarns and Life Stories - Inala Elders was an example. This was such a moving launch that it could not fail to influence my work.

Formal grant evaluations are also influential. They really encourage me to keep on improving my process.