How I made my digital story.

This is the process I used to make my digital story. I hope it helps you think about how you might go about crafting yours. This will be long and rambling. It’s a reflective piece I wrote just to document what was going on while I worked on the video. 

Click here to watch the video.

My digital story started with an idea. (That sounds dumb. I’ll start over.) I was batting around a bunch of ideas for my digital story based primarily on pictures and video I already had. I figured it would be easier than trying to get new pictures and new videos. But I also wanted some experience using our new digital video equipment, and I wanted to make my experience creating my digital story as close to “from scrap” as possible. I mentioned I wanted to make a sample digital story to Jennifer Sias, and she remembered something I’d written about at a previous Writing Project function. She said I should make one about Casey, so that’s what I did.

I with the video clips. I went to where Casey lives and just walked around filming whatever I thought was interesting: Casey, cars waiting at the stoplight, panhandlers, the magic makers sign, shots of the surrounding buildings. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it all yet, but I started to brainstorm ideas while I was shooting. Here were my first notes:

I want to talk about Casey and how he looks like an old man. I want to talk about the sign that the owner put up assuring you that Casey was fine. I want to talk about the panhandlers on the corner I ended up talking to. I want to talk about the mission and the liquor store and the costume shop. I want to talk about the traffic buzzing around behind me like nothing unusual was going on while I looked at a monkey.

I had the video on the camera for a few days before I did anything else with it. Over the weekend, I knew I wanted to have my digital story finished for today, so I wrote the rough draft of the text. I wrote it quickly because I wanted it to have a loose, tossed off style like we have in our sacred writing. I wanted it to feel spontaneous. I ended up writing it on an evenvelope for guitar strings I found in a bar while I was watching my brother’s band play on Friday night. I borrowed a pen from the bartender and I took it into the corner and wrote it on the envelope. It was dark and only light by black light and I couldn’t really see what I was writing. I feel like writing in this situation helped keep this piece casual, quick, and flowing like I wanted it to feel. Plus, I wanted this project to feel fun and not like work, so I wrote it in a casual atmosphere. Also, I needed to write it while I felt like it because if I put it off I would never get around to it.

I kept the envelope in the visor for my truck from Friday to Tuesday. I brought it in to Corbly on Tuesday so I could work on my digital story after SI. I decided to post it on the Open Mic Blog on Tuesday afternoon during Tech Time at SI just to test out how the Open Mic worked. While I was posting it, I cleaned it up a little bit rewriting some of the clunkier bits. The main trouble I had was with the sentence: “Between the mission and the liquor store where bums hustle people from Chesapeake for dollars while they wait to cross the bridge there’s a shop called Magic Makers.” This sentence is clunky in the recorded piece, but on the envelope the modifiers were hoplessly misplaced and confusing. I was surprised that most of my original draft was useable. I decided to add the bit about Casey liking his back scratched because I just rememered it as I was revising.

I posted it on the Open Mic blog because I hoped someone would see it and comment real fast and give me a good idea. No one has commented yet. I am curious if anyone will. I think we need to really start doing our part to read and comment on e-Anthology posts so that we support the community.

To create the video, I used two steps.

First I recorded the audio. I used Audacity and one of the wireless LAV mics Jennifer got us for SI. I just recorded it straight into the computer while I read it from my Open Mic Blog post in another window. I trimmed off a bit of silence at the beginning and end. That was easy to do. A harder step I did was I applied some digital filters using to improve the sound quality. I wasn’t 100% happy with the raw recording, so I ran the noise reducer, EQ, and compressor plug ins. If you’re comfortable fooling around with Audacity, this might be something you’d like to try to. If not, just getting the raw recording of your voice should work fine.

My next step was to start working on my video. I found it was easy to find appropriate clips for the story since I’d written it after taking the video. The story I wrote naturally flowed from my footage, so I just matched up the images with my sentences. I was worried about this step because I thought it might take forever, but since my story was so short it didn’t take me too long at all. I didn’t try any fancy tricks. I just put video of what I was talking about over the sound file. Matching it up exactly was kind of a pain, and I think I could tighten up some of the edits. I saved the project files, so I can go back to it later if I want.