What is digital storytelling? Imagine a short video, about four minutes long, containing spoken word over music and carefully-timed still images.  For an example, see a finished product by our friend Evelyn Van Til from the Ohio State University: “Happiness”.  Why tell a story this way? Digital storytelling tickles audio, visual, and tactile senses simultaneously: by hearing the voice, seeing the pictures, and feeling the rhythm, the audience profoundly experiences the storyteller’s reality.

As part of our pilot project, Alison Colman, our founder, is currently serving as a digital storytelling guest artist for the TRANSIT ARTS program. TRANSIT ARTS, as the organization’s website describes, “transports young people to a place of discovery where they expand their creative abilities and realize a world of possibilities”, often in spite of these students’ everyday environments, which devalue such abilities and possibilities in favor of emotional challenges, limits, prejudices, and expectations.

We will keep you updated on the students’ progress. So far, they have explored big questions. What are good stories about? Their answers in the group discussion included relationships, entertainment, food, and travel. How are good stories told? They decided it was the evocation of emotions and experiences through strong detail, honest recall, and careful timing. Having pulled stories from their own experiences and jotted down all the elements of these stories – the exposition, problem, climax, and solution – the students are now prepared to record their own voices telling these stories, many of them for the first time in their lives.

It is truly a thrilling process that comes with stories of its own, of challenges for the students and challenges for the instructors, and victories and lessons for all. We take in the whole story, aurally, visually, and rhythmically, and trust in the way life’s stories have of reaching a climax of change and learning.

Click here to view more pictures of the students and the process.