Digital Story Telling duex

Hey class. So this would be my second post on digital storytelling and guess what? I still think those sites listed (hope I didn't offend you Jeff) are boring. And get this, when I had that optimistic pop of creative thinking flow through my brain after seeing the "I have crabs" story, I found a longer, deeper, also extremely interesting story in its own right, on the same site.

I picked this particular story because my friend morgan said, "hey look, this is my teacher, I think I have a girl crush on that woman". I chuckled, watched the video, and realized why Morgan has a girl crush on this woman; she is one amazing writer and one amazing storyteller.













...please turn your cell phones off and no crying babies...


Megan Stielstra from 2nd Story on Vimeo.


This was just like the last video I wrote about, in that I sat through the whole thing and didn't for one second think about trying to find a different story. I was immersed in this one. Again, I know, with the whole obvious narrative; but in that respect, I think one of the reasons I found this story to be so interesting is because the plot is not obvious. You have the big, in the present, I got a book on my desk story, and the mini, in the past, moral issues, messed up students story.

So no, there were not multiple people narrating it, but I found it just as, or more interesting than the first story. This is partially because of the way she set up her story, described the characters, figuratively put your brain into this point of her life so you saw it. And I think, for one, that there were multiple people narrating. You got the funny, I like Grey's Anatomy Megan, the optimistic young teacher Megan, the struggling, conflicted teacher Megan, and the I am now the teacher I am Megan. And I say these are multiple narrators because these weren't non-tangible characters/strangers in her story, she was right there in front of all those people stepping into the character that was herself and playing that part so it was like there were four different people telling a story.

This is something you can't do with traditional storytelling in a book sense. The author can't write the same story, starting with one character and then suddenly making that character into someone else, changed, and then suddenly doing that again, and again, and again; without writing a book longer than 13 minutes worth of reading time.

Another advantage I see to this particular way of storytelling is I couldn't attend that live event (since it obviously was not originally digital storytelling), but that's not an issue because I can see the same facial expressions, hand gestures, hear the same tone of voice on the web. I like that. I have a busy schedule folks but I still like to enjoy the creative work of others in and out of my major.

And like I said before, I found colossal value in this story because I wasn't imagining it for myself; taking the words and creating a picture of my own, she was doing it for me. I appreciate that because it makes it more real. It makes this story soaking with adjectives and phrases and references real in the fact that this actually happened; it wouldn't be a true story if my brain was making up some guys named Dan and David who said fuck a lot and wore huge headphones because my brain would come up with something completely different than her experience. So by seeing this story online, representing a live performance, seeing her face and hands moving, I get her experience.