While both writing and digital storytelling are effective in conveying messages, I come to realize that digital media though more complex to create, allows the creator to “texturize” the story therefore creating a more vivid reality to the viewer, while writing despite being a faster process, it is also more dependent on reader’s imagination and interpretation due to its more “one toned” nature. As a newcomer in this digital storytelling world, I had to overcome unexpected setbacks throughout every single phase of the creation process, and figure out how to merge writing, sound and image in a cohesive manner. Creating can be intimidating in both processes, however my challenges aside from technical were also personal since it was a personal story linked to images.
Choosing a theme for this project was somewhat easy, since I had many pictures saved from the phase of my life I chose to talk about and also the one I felt was extremely connected to the theme truth or fiction that we have been learning at professor Handy’s class. The writing process challenged me to focus, sift through my experiences and write about the most impactful facts with enough description which gave me the opportunity to reminiscence about that period of my life from a lighter perspective I also developed the best setting for me to flow, which is being somewhere public and listening to instrumental music that helps me tap into the mood I am trying to convey. Once I wrote about my story of choice, I had to dig in a few years back to find enough personal pictures as evidence that supported my story around the main event. The next step was the most grueling one to me: voice recording! When recording what I had written, I had to keep in mind that I wanted to bring out a certain emotion on the viewer, so I recorded it over and over until I felt somewhat satisfied and that’s a huge distinction from the act of strictly writing.
I decided to use WeVideo because it seemed the easiest way to create the video and to me time is really important since all classes I am taking are heavy in writing and I am a beginner writer. WeVideo is user friendly and it allowed me to build my timeline fairly quick, however I did end up with some image gaps in my voiceover flow. All personal images I had collected over the years did not cover certain descriptive and dark parts of the story to make the it complete, so I relied on image outsourcing. Since I was already using WeVideo I decided to check their sound and image library and ended up finding great “gap fillers” and three different songs that matched all the mood transitions throughout my timeline. Once I finally finished it, I proceeded to download the final product, only to find out that the material I used from Wevideo’s library was not part of the free package they offered. I was not willing to pay for it so here I was back at square one on the gap filling quest, so I decided to follow the professor’s suggestions on finding images and sounds to work with, free of any new issues.
Because time restriction was now more prominent at that point due to other papers, I had to work on, I rushed the redo process. I did not put the same effort in finding the most coherent images or even the music, and in that sense, I recognize that the frustration I experienced from the failure at the first attempt, affected my final product. I had also had plans to tweak existing placing and time length of images, and better sound oscillation to improve the flow, but again my frustration blocked it out.
When gathering material for my story in future projects, I’ll consider the full spectrum of emotions and if they don’t cover it, be prepared to outsource material from free of fees sources. I realized that being prepared for things to go wrong is important so start projects earlier to give myself extra time in case something does go wrong where it requires me to redo a project partially or even entirely. Writing is still very challenging to me but adding digital – even though more time consuming – is a rich new way to tell a story.
