My digital story is about my developing - and ultimately, fulfilling - my "need for speed." I've always enjoyed driving fast, but obviously that's difficult and dangerous to do, along with being illegal, on city streets. I've gone to go kart tracks, watched many races over the years, but always felt a desire to actually "race" a car on a race track. This is that story. It's a very personal one, and in this case, I used a mostly casual, friendly, and engaging style to draw the learner in. That's how I supported the Personalization Principle.
This project helped me pull together and demonstrate many key elements of the course. In particular, I strongly resisted throwing everything plus the kitchen sink into the video. I was minimalistic in use of graphics, tried not to over-talk the narration (many edits and revisions went into the script), and even deleted several pictures I wanted to include "because I thought they were cool" but that added no value. I believe I supported the Multimedia Principle well (not overloading learning channels), and I feel I did support the Coherence Principle well also, by weeding out extraneous audio and video.
The key first step, was, of course, defining the project: what was the story I wanted to tell? Making sure I had created some boundaries so the end result would not be an endless video was clearly important, and I had to go through several script iterations to accomplish that. Pulling in images was not that hard, except for the weeding out process, which took more than a bit of time. Some fine tuning while matching the script to the particular images also took time. I used the tried and true PhotoStory application from Microsoft. I played a bit with YouTube's editor, as well as UTellStory, but neither seemed to be able to do what I knew I could in Photostory. I had not used PhotoStory in a while, and considering how old it is, I was pleasantly surprised how well it met my digital storytelling production needs. So, key things learned would be to allow enough time for the script creation and editing process to play out, and to not underestimate how long it takes to match (and then cull) the images I wanted to use with the script.
Overall, I'm pleased with the result. A couple of the images (scanned in or from screen capture) are not quite as crisp as I wanted, but unless people try to watch the video on a big monitor or TV, it's probably not an issue. My handy dandy Samson microphone again impressed me with ease of use and how it 'helped' my voice over.
I would enjoy getting feedback on this result!
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