I’ve just finished work (with Helen Klaebe and an absolutely crack pair of research/production assistants) on the second series of digital stories for the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project.

This time, we were working mostly with older current and past residents of the Kelvin Grove area, and we’d discovered early on (with the help of past participants) that the motivation to make digital stories as part of this project was not primarily ‘creative’, but rather to do with the preservation of memory, social interaction and the sharing of knowledge. Additionally, several participants had health issues that made it difficult to do everything the ‘traditional’ way.

So we tried some experiments, including taking over a lot of the final assembly of the images and sound, while focussing on getting everybody together to share their stories, talk about their memories of the site, and ensuring that they all participated in the storyboarding and made decisions around the final editing process. We also tried something I’ve been wanting to play with for a while, which was to make some unscripted stories. This meant that the outcome of the storycircle process for some participants was something like an interview schedule – a roadmap for a chat – rather than a script that they read out. I then had the task of editing down long audio files (in some cases, 20 minutes worth) to 2 minute voiceovers, which was interesting. Not least because of the additional ethical and emotional burden on the team to get the substance and spirit of the story right. It’s also brought into sharp relief my ongoing questions about just how much the mastery of technologies is essential to cultural participation in new media contexts.

Yesterday was the screening of the next-to-final versions, and it went well so look out for the launch in May/June sometime.