Stories to go

I've been back in Britain for a month. What do I hold onto from the Sedona Festival? The power of objects - the power to revive memories. In our storycircles we use objects to provoke stories at random. Passing a bag of objects around the circle each participant blindly removes one item. They are invited to write for ten minutes about some memory that the item provokes. Often the story they write at stage becomes the basis for their digital story script.
I want to explore this power further - for myself and for others.
I was inspired by the shoebox project introduced to the festival by Huw Davies from BBC Wales (I had travelled 5,500 miles to hear about something created less than two hundred miles from where I live!)
Second hand stories and My whole life for sale by John Freyer also draw heavily on objects as stories. In a different way so did Megan Hayward's Of day of night project use the power of objects. The central character created the fictional histories of objects to reawaken dreams. Those histories and her response to them are the content of a non linear on a CD-ROM . The line I remember was "the unexpected associations created by the collison of memories and dreams".
Perhaps by exploring the unexpected associations between events and memories our digital stories will reveal more not only to ourselves but our audiences too.

What's missing?

At the end of the festival I felt that something important had been missed in the presentations. After several days of listening, watching and participating where was the audience? Who were the stories being made for? Who would watch?
It seemed strange to me - someone from the BBC - for a creative event not to consider the audience. Before we make anything in the BBC we think about the potential audience and throughout the workshops we talk about what the audience will make of the story. But here in the USA there was almost no consideration given to publishing or broadcasting the stories. In fact there would be huge problems with rights if many of the stories were published because of the lavish use of commercially produced music.
I have emailed Denise Atchley and suggested a presentation next year on the subject of The Audience - who's watching our digital stories?

CyndiGreeningDigitalStory

This film was made at the Boot Camp that preceded the Digital Storytelling Festival in June 2004. CyndiGreeningDigitalStory