The picture of a face that launched a thousand ships.

OR HOW TO TELL A POWERFUL STORY IN 3 MINUTES OR LESS.

Someone once told me that Ernest Hemingway would write his short stories over and over again, trashing whole stories until he got it just right. Telling a short story effectively is not so much about what you include as it is what you don’t. A digital story is the same as any other artistic endeavor, which is creating emotion through your medium. Whether paint or film, music or banging on a hollow log, if the art doesn’t have emotion then it is just a hollow log. But if the right proportions of emotion, technical expertise and sometimes just serendipitous luck are used to tell a meaningful story it will go a long way to creating an emotional one.

Much of the readings surrounding this exploration talk about how useful the knowledge of digital storytelling can be in our modern ones and zeros life. It is as if this type of storytelling is somehow different that what has come before or is more powerful. I would argue that it is no more or less powerful and is only the most current iteration of storytelling. Read a Hemingway short-story slowly, carefully and marvel at the craft of wordsmithing. Stare into the depth of Rembrandt’s eyes in one of his self-portraits and wonder at how ground up bits of color mixed with lindseed oil can show us an old mans life. Listen to a piece of music and let it transform you to a place you’ve never been. Everytime I listen to Muzsorsky Pictures at an Exhibition I can feel myself walking a promenade. These are all pre-digital examples but the point is clear, that digital storytelling is not new its just changed with the times.

This is I think the third time I’ve started this blog. Even though I don’t have symptoms of covid-19 I feel as though it has drained all my energy. My first current event paper for my Geography class this semester was on the virus as it broke in Wuhan, that was mid-January, I watched the numbers of infected triple in three days. I did another current event paper two weeks ago on the virus, that was a report on worst-case scenarios. The grim outlook reported on the proposed death toll disturbed me, the numbers sobering. Staying on-task has been difficult for me, caring about this video project seemed so distant. Its hard to put into a personal statement what this means to me when it is impacting the entire globe. My feelings are not unusual, for all the talk about being connected in a global world I feel very isolated. I used to go to the coffeeshop to write, I went to the mall to walk on bad-weather days. I used to go to the grocery store early on Saturday mornings and be the only one there, now there are 50 other people with me trying to hoard toilet paper and bread.

I was excited for this project, creating a digital story is something the creative side of me was looking forward to. Having a fine arts degree, the artistic expression this project was aiming for was something I could jump right into. During the last few weeks I have reflected often on the fact that my generation, those in their late 50’s are a unique cohort. We can be considered the digital generation – maybe not in the sense that it is thought of today but I have witnessed in my time a revolution from filmstrip projectors, slides and mimeograph machines to making digital stories that combine emotionally significant sensory stimulation that can often reach us at our very core.

So, what does this mean for our students? What does this mean for learning the craft of telling a story? In the ages that have since gone without being recorded, the storyteller passed the knowledge through the generations. The storyteller kept the generations connected, the stories they told served many purposes and our digital stories and the ones our students tell join us together to share knowledge and unite us. Today with isolation and connectivity sparring for our attention a true storyteller can alleviate our loneliness and connect us together in unique ways.

My digital story as it began and finished seems somehow trite, old and meaningless. Maybe a good story for me and maybe one for the student I wanted to connect it to but in a pandemic hardly relevant, hardly meaningful. My story was intended to be about working through one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life and showing the student that soldiers are people and that banning the military may not be what she intended and may be in fact the wrong target of what she wants to ban. As I write this, now I wonder if the dedication and humanness I was trying to get across to show my growth as a person and within the confines of being a soldier did come across, and really how irrelevant is that experience in this time of uncertainty? Maybe that dedication and humanness is what we need to be looking at more closely.

Within the readings for this exploration the ideas presented worked like some bizarre vacuum attachment to my brain. I have been remembering often and reflecting a great deal on the evolution of this idea of digital storytelling. In fourth grade I remember filmstrip projectors with the newest technology, an audible beep that told when to advance the filmstrip. I remember as a high school senior putting images together with a soundtrack to create an audio/visual story. In college, way back in the early 90’s I worked on a team project that showed, in a variety of visual ways, what it would be like to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Our team built models and dioramas, we showed video clips and photos and presented research and no one in our class was unaffected by the scenes we showed of the apocalypse.

The students in the 8^th grade class I was observing were working on civic engagement projects, they were identifying issues significant to them, using their computers to find information about elected officials and send them their ideas. I watched the three classes discover how to find who their legislative representatives are at the local, state and federal levels. I saw them excited when they would receive an answer to their inquiry or deflated when they felt ignored. Their project was something that needed a stick-to-it attitude and clear drive to get the job done, would my digital story get that point across? My real goal was not to instill a stick-to-it mindset but to show her that soldiers were just regular people and that maybe it wasn’t the military she wanted to ban but the politicians that sent the soldiers into danger. Maybe I would be able to show her that there is a face and feelings in every soldier.

The technical side of this project was not as hard for me as the video game project. For this work I understand images, music, text, color, sound all the things that make for a powerful piece of art. Within the parameters of digital storytelling we are all artists, we all have stories to tell and unique ways to tell those stories. I thought many time of collages throughout the finishing of this piece. A digital story is not unlike a collage in that it takes images from a variety of sources and combines them into pleasing or discordant ways. This is the real power of a digital story, being able to manipulate emotions in technologically more powerful ways. I can see where a digital story would be an infinitely more powerful tool than even the best crafted letter. But the best crafted digital story is just another type of art.