I didn't call it Digital Storytelling. I was trying to reach a low-income market, and decided that the fashionable term wouldn't do. People who want to make movies at the grass-roots level don't need the fancy term. They need to know just what they are getting themselves in for.
Commitment: We started the class by telling the group that we would be showing up for seven weeks of Saturdays and that we expected them to do the same. No missing class. Period. "A death in the family...yours" would be the only excuse. About the third class, Ayo didn't show, hadn't called, and left a message that her mother was sick and so she had to do to Atlanta. I sent her a very stern email saying that she needed to get ahold of me during the week to be caught up but that a second absence would mean dropping the class. She never came back, never called, and that was that.
The team: We put together a team of teachers: me, Jean-Francois, Joe and Mike. Last summer, we recruited a young woman, Alice, but she dropped out, citing all the work she was doing for a photography class she was taking. Really, she thought I was being too bossy and she was probably right. I had some definite ideas about how to do this and while it wasn't My Way or the Highway, it was in fact, My Way or the Secondary Road.
Mike teaches audio editing using Audacity, a free program you can download from the 'net. JF has been using amateur video techniques in his French classes. Joe, now a Presbyterian preacher, used to be a filmmaker and has done one of these programs with at-risk youth at some point in his Other Life. Last week, I recruited Alfonso, who makes little videos for a nearby university. He came in Saturday for the first time, and went around critiquing everybody's movie. He had great suggestions for everybody.
The class: We had ten or eleven applicants, but by the time we assembled in mid-January, we had eight students. Two are on Social Security disability. Three are low-income. One is a teenager. His single mother joined the class since she was going to have to drive him over every week and the trek is too long for coming and going. Three are African-American. Two are government employees, one with the IRS, the other with the Veterans Administratin. The VA lady is a veteran herself. A more diverse group you couldn't get if you advertised for it.
Community building: The first class, mostly run by Joe and after the stern commitment speech, we started telling stories. Joe and I had decided on four possible themes for the movie we would produce: Childhood, Jobs and Finances, My Hero, and Home. So we went around the room, all of us teachers including ourselves, and told a short anecdote on each topic. The idea was to find the topic that had the most "heat," the most energy, the most visual possibility, the closest to the bone. We illustrated what we meant with our own stories. We wanted action, not philosophizing. We wanted stuff we could actually create, not technical impossibilities. What came out of those first two classes was something we hoped, but didn't actually know would work: we created a community. We created a group of people who would help one another, who would accept one another's creativity, who would respect and support one another.
It was the first unhoped-for dividend. People faced with having to actually produce from the place of their creativity are often nervous, shy, afraid even. Just putting their stories into the world is a fragile and delicate process, fraught with old naysaying voices. Add to that the issue of technology and you have a tightrope walk. Our teenager wasn't sure he had anything to say. His mom feels she leads a mundane life. Our African-American guy comes out of a long history of creative failure. He told a story about never learning the guitar because every time he had one, he soon pawned it. One of our disabled folks can't see without a magnifying glass, gets short of breath when she needs to give speeches and can't manage to get to class with all the images, videos and audio files she'll need in one folder. Our bureaucrats are the most creatively constipated of the whole bunch. "I can't," they have each said at one time or another.
But we made a community together, and each and every one of them has created a movie with a story from real life.
The tools: We got a deal on a groups of FlipVideos, little digital cameras that have one on switch and one record switch and one playback switch. Simpler to use you don't get. The videos that come out are, in the words of my filmmaking buddy in India, "organic." That is unsophisticated, not the sharpest images, and not the best sound. We don't care. We're making grass-roots videos, and the whole idea is that this should be within the means of just about everybody. For a low-income person, a $150 video camera is still a hefty investment, but it is the first time this kind of technology is within her reach.
We bought some sound equipment-- little voice recorders that, like the Flips, plug directly into the computer's USB port. Olympuses. We got microphones to go with them. As it turned out, Mike brought some equipment from the university where he works and served as sound engineer for us all. One by one, he took them into the "sound studio," also-known-as the ladies restroom. Our second day of recording, we had a professional visiting. Carol Andrews is a local newscaster (and a buddy of mine) who stopped by to do an intro and conclusion to Terry's story. He framed his tale as if it were a newscast. Carol helped us drape the "studio" with blankets from the thrift store and VOILA, a sound studio!
We bought an LCD projector...partly because the nonprofit where we were working needed one anyway, and I frankly don't understand how you can run a technology course without one. We need a screen too...but your basic grass-roots folks can find one at a yard sale for $10. That's where we got the one we're using. We've used the projector for the two actual tutorials we've offered the class: Windows Movie-Maker and Audacity. In future classes, we'll refine the use of this projector. Jean-Francois, who taught Movie-Maker, realized that we need to take more time but have the students on their computers actually following along as he demonstrates the features of the software.
We are using Windows Movie-Maker and Audacity, since most people have the first on their PCs and everybody can download the second. This makes the editing software 100% free. We are also using WM Converter because for some reason, the movies that come off of the Flips don't play well with Movie-Maker on the machines at the nonprofit where we're doing the class. File conversion was Mike's idea the first time we tried to watch the first videos.
Next: The curriculum
