Archive for the ‘storytelling’ Category
5×5’s
Can you tell a story in 5 short, 5 second clips? That’s a question I pondered when I stumbled across Five Vignettes channel and 5×5 Fanatics group on Vimeo. Fun concept. I started by filming 5 still objects and scenes with little movement in them. It was boring, I admit. The images were “pretty” and unique, and I spent a lot of time framing the shot, but when I put the clips together the 25 seconds was painfully awkward. Paint peeling, anyone? Why not just use a 5 second delay on a Flickr slideshow?… So, I looked for some inspiration and started filming scenes with movement: grass blowing in the wind, auto traffic, people walking, TV (whoa movement!), and water. A much more interesting story appeared.
Limiting a story to 25 seconds feels a bit overwhelming at first, especially if you come from a family of long-winded storytellers as I do. 25 seconds to show something, to express myself, to reveal a complex landscape, or share a wildly intense experience? It’s a lively challenge. I found, though, that breaking 25 seconds into 5 shots requires you to truly survey an experience, pick out the details in a seemingly grand landscape and chisel into the heart of an activity, among other things. Looking for unique angles, small details, movement vs. stillness, and noise adds to the discovery of a place or the expression of a thought. What’s more, the 25 second vignette can be a great activity to foster conversation between people familiar with the same place, but who chose or would choose different images to convey the importance of that place or to “paint that picture.” Want to see how your neighbors and friends view the town? Host a 5×5 potluck dinner - conversation, food, and discovering more about a place, yourself, and others. Can’t beat that… or can you? What are your ideas of how to use a 5×5 vignette to bring people together in conversation?
5×5: Stockholm from Ruthie on Vimeo.
SO, grab a camera, tell a story in 5 short, 5 second clips about something in, around, or about your town, and share your 5×5 with us!
Here are a few choice 5×5’s: Letus Test, Autumn, Spring, The Bay
You’ve Always Wanted to Visit Vermont…
I’m not blogging as much these days, but I sure am busy, and online. I’m also on my bike–post coming soon about that.
You’ll find me on delicious, Twitter, Flickr and, most of all, improving our new website and planning our summer workshops. Let me persuade you to venture up (down?) this way, explore the lovely countryside of Vermont, and join us for one of our creative workshops.
Over the course of the year, we offer a sampling of our innovative, experiential workshops, here in our Vermont barn, ranging from three to five days. We bring together community activists and organizers, teachers, nonprofit staff and anyone interested in weaving the rich promise of storytelling and social media into the fabric of their lives, their work, their art. Be inspired by our surroundings and our creative exercises and expertise. We are committed to tailoring our workshops to meet the needs and interests of the participants.
We hope you’ll join us!
2009 Summer/Fall Offerings
Connections, Conversation and Creativity: A Social & Expressive Media Workshop
July 8 – 10
How do we harness the connective and creative potential of online practices in our communities? How do we move beyond simple information sharing to fostering creativity and sustained collaboration? In three days of discussion and hands-on activities, we cover a range of social and expressive media practices to enhance communication and collaboration, to foster creative culture, and to engage our communities actively in our work. Limited to 10
Storytelling in Our Communities
July 30 – August 1
October 1 -3
In this workshop, we explore storytelling in community-based efforts. We help participants design storytelling projects for civic engagement and participation, using a range of old and new media to enhance bonds and build bridges across community while creating a vision for the future. We cover traditional and digital storytelling methods in an experiential, fun-filled three days. Limited to 10
The Whole Story: Deep Creativity and Balance
August 6 – 8
September 17 – 19
During three days of storytelling, movement and meditation, we will deepen our practice as artists, activists and citizens. Learn to listen deeply and actively, to share stories, and to incorporate the serious play of creativity into your life. Led by Barbara Ganley and Cynthia Fuller-Kling (yoga teacher and artist extraordinaire)
Workshop Leaders:
Barbara Ganley, Director and Founder of Digital Explorations. Known for her energy, her creative exercises, and her deep knowledge in the field, Barbara brings over twenty years of teaching writing and creative thinking, and eight years working in the worlds of social media and digital storytelling to our workshops. Read more about her on our About Us page.
Remy Mansfield, Storytelling Fellow. Remy brings his great skill in digital storytelling, in designing and leading storytelling workshops for youth, and his gifts as a photographer to the workshop setting. Read more about him here.
Cynthia Fuller-Kling. Cynthia joins us for The Whole Story workshops this year. A former modern dancer, she has been a noted yoga teacher for twenty years and artist who draws upon movement, photography, video and language in her installations and performances.
Daily Schedule for All Workshops:
9:00 -noon Morning session
noon-1:00 Lunch
1:00 – 4:00 p.m. Afternoon Session
Location:
Tucked away at the end of a long dirt driveway, and yet just two miles from the center of Middlebury, Vermont, you’ll find our barn studio, fields and patios set in glorious surroundings with pastoral views reaching to both the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks.
Workshops meet in the barn studio and porch, and, as weather permits, out on the nearly 70 acres around us. At the end of the day, you’ll have time to explore the countryside (lakes, mountains, villages) by foot, bike or car.
Lodging & Meals: For overnight accommodation, many charming inns and bed & breakfasts dot the area. Contact us for recommendations. As a college town, Middlebury has an array of dining options. We will cook and eat together the first evening; Digital Explorations will provide local-ingredient based lunches.
Costs: $400 per three-day workshop includes all instruction and materials, three lunches and one dinner. Lodging not included.
Take a peek at our setting through this Flickr slide show
For more information:
Email: Barbara@digitalexploration.org
Phone: 802 989 1885
Well, what are you waiting for?!
Summer & Fall Workshops in Vermont
Summer at Digital Explorations
We offer a sampling of our innovative, experiential workshops here in our Vermont barn. If you’re interested in exploring the rich promise of storytelling and social media join us. Be inspired by our surroundings and our creative exercises and expertise. We tailor our workshops to meet the needs and interests of our participants.
Ask us about our Workshops-to-Go!
Connections, Conversation and Creativity: A Social & Expressive Media Workshop July 8 - 10
How do we harness the connective and creative potential of online practices in our communities? How do we move beyond simple information sharing to fostering creativity and sustained collaboration? In three days of discussion and hands-on activities, we cover a range of social and expressive media practices to enhance communication and collaboration, to foster creative culture, and to engage our communities actively in our work. Limited to 10
Storytelling in Our Communities July 30 – August 1 October 1 -3
In this workshop, we explore storytelling in community-based efforts. We help participants design storytelling projects for civic engagement and participation, using a range of old and new media to enhance bonds and build bridges across community while creating a vision for the future. We cover traditional and digital storytelling methods in an experiential, fun-filled three days. Limited to 10
The Whole Story: Deep Creativity and Balance August 6 - 8 September 17 – 19
During three days of storytelling, movement and meditation, we will deepen our practice as artists, activists and citizens. Learn to listen deeply and actively, to share stories, and to incorporate the serious play of creativity into your life. Workshop Leaders: Barbara Ganley and Cynthia Fuller-Kling
Workshop Leaders:
Barbara Ganley, Director and Founder of Digital Explorations. Known for her energy, her creative exercises, and her deep knowledge in the field, Barbara brings over twenty years of teaching writing and creative thinking, and eight years working in the worlds of social media and digital storytelling to our workshops. Read more about her on our About Us page. Remy Mansfield, Storytelling Fellow. Remy brings his great skill in digital storytelling, in designing and leading storytelling workshops for youth, and his gifts as a photographer to the workshop setting. Read more about him here. Cynthia Fuller-Kling: Cynthia joins us for The Whole Story workshops this year. A former modern dancer, she has been a noted yoga teacher for twenty years and artist who draws upon movement, photography, video and language in her installations and performances.
Daily Schedule for All Workshops:
9:00 -noon Morning session noon-1:00 Lunch 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. Afternoon Session
Location:
Tucked away at the end of a long dirt driveway, and yet just two miles from the center of Middlebury, Vermont, you’ll find our barn studio, fields and patios set in glorious surroundings with pastoral views reaching to both the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. Workshops meet in the barn studio and porch, and, as weather permits, out on the nearly 70 acres around us. At the end of the day, you’ll have time to explore the countryside (lakes, mountains, villages) by foot, bike or car.
Lodging & Meals:
For overnight accommodation, many charming inns and bed & breakfasts dot the area. Contact us for recommendations. As a college town, Middlebury has an array of dining options. We will cook and eat together the first evening; Digital Explorations will provide local-ingredient based lunches.
Costs:
$400 per three-day workshop includes all instruction and materials, three lunches and one dinner. Lodging not included. Take a peek at our setting through this Flickr slide show. For more information: Email: Barbara@digitalexploration.org Phone: 802 989 1885
Digital Explorations: If you’re looking for me, you’ll find me here
After months of dreaming, planning and working flat-out with my merry band of advisors, board members and Fellows, and with the encouragement of so many of you, the new nonprofit, Digital Explorations is now officially launched online. What a nine months it has been–the gestation period has seen us immersed in a variety of projects ranging from storytelling in rural communities as a way to engage people in civic life, to helping mentor teachers trying to deepen creative learning experiences for their students in spite of NCLB, to developing our own workshops and taking the first steps towards opening our first Center for Community Digital Exploration. There’s so much to share about what we’ve learned, to reflect upon, to puzzle over that I hardly know where to begin other than to share our site with you: Digital Explorations.
From the website:
We’ve made it–onto our website–after a couple of years of dreaming from inside the walls of higher education about a different model of learning: townspeople coming together online and in person to share their collected expertise, their community-based projects, their processes through connecting, creating, collaborating and conversing–here, in town, online, and all over the country! From talking through the possibilities with The Fab Fearless Five and convincing my fabulous board and staff to join me in this adventure, to securing our first contracts and collaborations, I am thrilled by the response to our vision for bringing storytelling (both old and new), connective strategies (both old and new), and Centers for Community Digital Exploration into the heart of rural downtowns. We’d love to hear your feedback, your ideas, your wisdom. Let us know where you come across like-minded adventurers. We’ll keep you updated as to our news and projects, including our reflections on our work, our discoveries out there in the blogosphere, and our plans for future directions. Please wander about the site, read all about us, and let us know what you think!
Digital Story of Damariscotta Heart & Soul Story Interviews
Watch a short movie of excerpts from neighbor-to-neighbor chats in Damariscotta, Maine as part of Orton Family Foundation’s Heart and Soul Project.
With Orton, we are exploring the potential role of storytelling, both traditional and digital forms, in community engagement efforts. Damariscotta has experimented with story circles and story interviews thus far as ways to bring the community together and to give everyone a voice in planning for the town’s future. Sharing stories about our connections to a place, our experiences in that place, our personal hopes for the future of that place slows us down enough to look carefully at what we value in our communities, and invites us to listen deeply to one another, to create bonds and bridges within our communities, and to work towards creative, collaborative solutions to the challenges of our times. Digital Explorations trained the story gatherers, and edited the clips and photos into this digital story to provide a brief glimpse into the project. These first-round story interviews explored residents’ connections to the town.
Vermont Workshop: Planning a Community Storytelling Project
On April 14, we led a workshop, on planning community storytelling projects, for Orton Family Foundation in Starksboro, Vermont as part of their Art & Soul Project, an initiative to use art to enhance civic engagement in rural communities as they plan for their future. View the slides from the workshop here:
A Storytelling Workshop in Victor, Idaho
A Process Experiment
“Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it…
Memory comes from somewhere else, it is outside of itself, it moves things about.”
Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 86-87
“Man is nostalgia and a search for communion.
Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, p.196
As I develop a firm grounding for the rural digital exploration centers I am planning, and work with several rural communities on a range of digital and analog storytelling projects, it’s important to push my own creative work as well, experimenting and developing more skill with image and text and sound and how they crash up against one another. I definitely need to return to FinalCutPro even for the drafts of digital stories. I’m interested in playing around with a somewhat transparent, interactive process, learning from Oliver Luker’s experiments over at dispatx, an online art collective I have followed for a while now, and the work of Camille Utterback, which I am just getting to know.
While I was teaching, I kept a blog for my creative work, bgexperiments, so as to differentiate between art and commentary. Now I’m going to muddy the waters by pulling pieces of creative works onto bgblogging, entangling them with theory, reflection and commentary. I’m hoping to learn more, to write better, to think better as a result. I’m eager to see what will happen.
The first experiment is a large, multi-strand, multimedia (sculpture, photography, video, interactive sound capture) installation, an exploration of the relationship between nostalgia and art, memory and creativity, identity and desire. I won’t reveal the full overview of how I envision the installation to work and what it will encompass; suffice it to say that it will be composed of different kinds of fragments intended to stand on their own as well as interfere with other fragments. Its working title is (dis)locations and (contra)dictions.
I’m interested in what posting drafts of pieces and inviting commentary-in-process will teach me. And how lacing through other posts that might touch on themes swirling about the pieces might influence the outcome. Will it be useful to anyone else? Will readers feel comfortable telling me straight about my creative work, the way they do about my critical? How will seeing these fragments influence the way readers see my reflective blogging? Will the conversation be able to draw from both or will this experiment fail?
Anyway, here goes with a draft-fragment:
I’ve also posted it to the Internet Archive and to blip.tv searching for improved viewing quality. For me, at least, the Internet Archive version is superior though smaller.
