The centre - one year on

Eduard Uzumeckis runs the Dana Atchley Centre for Digital Storytelling at the Sedona Centre for Arts and Technology.
Workshops started last November - participants are making films between three and five minutes long. He's also started community workshops where people are invited to submit their story after a three hour introductory session held on a Saturday. The script has to be submitted by email by midnight on the following Monday. They bring in their story assets for scanning etc. and the three day workshop follows. Ed showed us some of the films that his students had made. I spotted a few interesting techniques that added polish to the images. Individuals cropped from group pictures and the picture is reassembled as they feature in the story, building a composite image that retains the original order of the group picture but is still comprised of individual frames. Also crops from larger pictures were framed with a thin white border.
Eduard became very emotional as he paid tribute to Dana Atchley. He related how digital storytelling had changed his life and found it hard to get his words out. It had awakened an interest in photography and writing in him.
I observe here that an emotional involvement in projects like this often mean a certain amount of pain too. We invest our lives into something like digital storytelling - it draws us in - but we often have to negotiate with people who don't share our passions - often people who determine our future funding - and the process can be painful.