First Experience with Digital Stories

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been a contributor to Chicago Public Radio for about two and a half years. As such, I’ve gotten a lot of practice with Pro Tools and Vegas, two pieces of audio editing software. Even though I had never made a digital story or really done any video editing before, I wasn’t all that stressed about being assigned a digital story project in class. I figured that any video software I used would be close enough to Pro Tools that I could pick it up without much trouble. I started out trying to use Windows Movie Maker for Windows 8, but the interface was terrible and it was really difficult to figure out how to take advantage of a lot of the program’s functions (which is pretty much how things go for everything Windows 8), but I had much better luck with the iMovie app on my iPad. Aside from a few small problems (more on those later), iMovie was exactly what I was hoping the video editing process would be, and I was able to make my four-minute video in a relatively short amount of time. On the other hand, picking a subject for my digital story was by far the hardest part of the assignment.

I knew right away that I wasn’t too interested in making a digital story with a personal subject. The examples we saw in class all seemed to be about the creators of the pieces (or the creator’s pets), and that didn’t appeal to me, for three reasons. First, I thought that any digital story with me as the subject wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as one on another topic. Second, I rarely take pictures, so I don’t exactly have a big collection of personal photos to work from for a project like this. Finally, I honestly wasn’t all that comfortable with making a video about myself and putting it up on YouTube.

It took me a while, but I eventually settled on Sun Ra as the subject of my digital story. I did a research project on Sun Ra when I was a grad student at Loyola, and I am a pretty big fan of his music. Plus, he claimed that he was part of an angel race from Saturn and managed to get dozens of people to live in a compound with him and play in his band during a period of four decades, which I think is pretty interesting. It’s easy to write Sun Ra off as mentally ill (as the U.S. military did when they gave him 4F status during World War II), but I’ve always found it much more interesting to just take his claims at face value and go from there. As such, I chose not to acknowledge the craziness of his ideas and instead present Sun Ra as an alien rather than try to grapple with mental illness in a four minute video about an avant-garde musician.

Sun Ra’s art isn’t exactly populist, and I can see why many people would find it (and everything about him) a little too weird, but that weirdness is a big part of what I find so appealing about his work. Seeing everyone in class looking confused during the video—especially during the clips from his 1972 movie Space is the Place—is pretty much exactly what I expected the response to be when I was making it.

In spite of liking iMovie better than Windows Movie Maker, I didn’t love every aspect of it. Since I made my digital story on the iPad version of iMovie, there were some functions that weren’t available to me. I couldn’t figure out how to change the movement or size of images that I inputted, so some photos, like Sun Ra’s Rolling Stone cover and some pictures of the Arkestra, only showed up as zoomed-in fragments. Also, I realized about 75% of the way through making the video that the first forty-five seconds of the video were just two still images, but I couldn’t change that without disrupting everything that came later, which was very frustrating. In spite of these few problems, I did really enjoy making my digital story. However, considering how time consuming it is and how many great video resources there already are, I can’t see myself taking the time to make many digital stories for classroom use down the line. I am open, however, to assigning students digital stories as components of projects.