Collaborative+Digital+Stories

Two Collaborative Digital Story Projects: Charlestown Retirement Community American Friends Service Community

Charlestown Retirement Community My introduction into the world of digital storytelling came when the director of UMBC's New Media Studio asked me to join him in a project at Charlestown Retirement Community in 2006. Staff and students at UMBC were paired with residents of the retirement community to collect their stories and create digital stories of them. The residents wrote the stories, read them for recording, and provided some photos. UMBC staff and students handled all the technical details, editing, and production of any additional media needed. Because I entered the project while it was underway I wasn't fully trained in digital storytelling nor the Adobe Premiere Software I was given. So, my first co-story, My 2 Grandsons-produced with Mary Hein, was not my finest work. But I did learn a great deal about the editing software and successfully used my experience with video production to create one image-a flight delayed board-that only existed in Mary's memory. You can view that initial story [|here]. What I feel is one of my best work(out of 3 or 4 projects at Charlestown) is this story, co-produced with Jean Singleton, titled "All My Life's Circle". Here again, many of the images only existed in Jean's memory and I ambitiously created many photos and other images to help tell her story. This was the first time I used iconic, non-literal, images as part of the digital story. For me, it was a breakthrough from my old literal slide-show style past. I was also happy with the flow of the final video, seamlessly mixing family photos and my newly created photos. I did get permission from one photographer to use his images of Harry Chapin. For the music, I knew it could be difficult to get permission to use the original recording of the title song, so as a substitution I recorded myself playing a similar rendition on acoustic guitar. Jean gave me a lot of latitude in making the video, but I did pass the final version by her for approval before publishing. She had no requested changes, and due to the topic and title it has been my most viewed video on Youtube and the most viewed of all the Charlestown project. media type="youtube" key="j1jwlxs2kwI" height="385" width="480"

American Friends Service Community In the fall of 2008 UMBC partnered with the American Friends Service Committee to help Somali refugees in Baltimore create digital stories about their experience in Somalia and their subsequent refugee existence. This video was produced for my Somali partner Mohamed Iftin. This was a different process for me as I met Mohamed on a Saturday morning and had to finish his video by that afternoon. It was my first experience meeting Somali refugees and hearing their stories. The stories were moving and I felt empathy and respect for their struggle. In deference to Mohamed I let him guide most of the visual choices-photos and drawings he brought in-although I did negotiate some choices to strengthen the final video. The music was his choice. I added the visual effects and made many editing choices. I learned a lot about negotiation and respect for someone's story through this particular project. media type="youtube" key="axcYjsjzCAg" height="385" width="480"

Web page created by Paul Iwancio
Last edited May 2010 ISTC 633, Towson University, Spring 2010 Semester

Contact Paul at:
piwancio at g mail dot com