Capture Wales

As ever Daniel Meadows engaged the audience for every moment of his presentation. His passion for digital storytelling shone through from the moment his short summary of the the Capture Wales project began. He showed us a film made by his wife to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. We howled with laughter.
But Daniel was also very realistic about the future of our BBC projects. Anticipated funding from the Welsh Development Agency has not materialised and another potential partnership is going ahead without digital storytelling. The future of his project in it's present form is uncertain. There is no room for complacency. For me this was a realistic position and I identified with all too easily. In our vision there's such a lot to do - we are at such an early stage in this process - but we fear that we will soon be dismissed by the funders with glib statements like "we did that was last year" or "we've already done that" with no long term commitment. But progress is being made to keep the process alive with fresh thinking and this was demonstrated when Huw Davies introduced the Shoebox. It was designed to be a taster for digital storytelling with the aim of creating a one minute film in a day. Participants are invited to bring a shoebox of six to eight objects into their nearest BBC Wales Community Studio to tell a story. There's a short storycirle when the participants - up to five - tell the story prompted by their objects. A 100 word script is written and later recorded in stages in the community studio.. The objects are photographed and the images imported into Premiere. There's a short tutorial in Photoshop when the title is created. Next a Premiere demonstration and the images are dragged into the time line. Huw showed us a couple of stories - they were suprisingly good for such a short taster process.