this week's topic is Audience and Context

Capture Wales - Daniel Meadows

Everyone has a story to tell; if you don't believe that, then Digital Storytelling is not for you - but then, I would argue, neither is life itself.

Digital Stories are short, personal, multimedia tales, told from the heart. Because - in theory - anyone can make them and publish them on screens anywhere, they have the potential to be a very democratic kind of storytelling. Since July 2001 I have been leading Digital Storytelling workshops for the BBC in Wales during which over 250 people from all corners of the country

and all walks of life have completed their own two-minute film. To see the results, go to the Capture Wales website.

Digital Stories are "scrapbook television" made on the kitchen table, with feeling and the new tools of multimedia production: a personal computer, Adobe Photoshop, a non-linear video editing package (we use Adobe Premiere), a scanner, and an in/out DV video camera.

As a Digital Storyteller you can step through the screen. For too long the professionals have had it their own way, feeding us a kind of TV in which we are only represented by the labels they stick on us. Digital Storytelling allows us to reassert our individuality in the wired world. The computer we use is called a PowerBook. "Think Different" the Apple advert tells us and as Digital Storytellers we do, quite literally, "take the power back". Never before in the history of the BBC have members of the viewing public been given editing tools and invited to get on with it.

Revolutionary as it is there's also a strict discipline to the construction of our Digital Stories. Two hundred and fifty words, a dozen or so photographs, and two minutes is about the right length. We use video sparingly, if at all. These strictures, we find, make for elegance. Digital Stories are a bit like sonnets in this respect, multimedia sonnets from the people.

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The very first Digital Story I saw was Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer's I Photograph to Remember. Published in 1991 it was the first commercially produced CD ROM with continuous sound and images. It's now available on his website at ZoneZero.com (you'll need the Shockwave plug-in). At 35 minutes it is very long compared with the shorter form that I champion, but Meyer gets away with it because it is such a compelling tale.

The first short Digital Story I saw was by the American Dana Winslow Atchley III. Called Home Movies (and sometimes The Turn Film) I came across it in May 2000 on his website at NextExit.com.

I loved it so much that straight away I sent him an e-mail. Atchley replied, telling me that Digital Storytelling was a movement, a growing practice in the United States and that together with his colleagues Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen, he was running a Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, where people could sign up for a three-day workshop. A "bootcamp" he called it.

I made it to California that autumn, but sadly not before Atchley had progressed to the last stages of a terminal illness. He had never said anything about being unwell but, within a few short weeks, his life was over. We had swapped e-mails. We had spoken on the telephone. But we never met.

Lambert and Mullen completed my transformation from photographer to Digital Storyteller, something they began in California, with style and not a little patience, and finished the following summer in Wales.

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I have always been inspired by the writings of Ivan Illich, one of the most original political and social thinkers from the second half of the twentieth century. This radical anarchist, latterly a professor at Penn State University, had once been a New York parish priest. Illich argued against a society that endorses economic growth, political centralisation, and unlimited technology. My favourite of his books is Tools for Conviviality (1973). It includes the following passage:

"Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the

degree that he masters his tools he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision."

Digital Storytelling seems to me to be a convivial tool. As practitioners it is our job to thrill those who only stand and listen with the notion that they, too, have a voice.

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My singular contribution to the Digital Storytelling movement is that I have taken it into broadcast television. (My article detailing this process, Digital Storytelling: research-based practice in new media, is published in Visual�Communication, Sage Publications, vol 2, no.2, pp 189-193, June 2003, ISSN 1470-3572).

Since April 2001 when BBC Cymru Wales built a team around my idea - piloting it, testing it in the community and, finally, launching Capture Wales on the BBCi website - things have developed rapidly. The project won two awards in 2002, an Interactive Innovation Award from the Welsh Development Agency and a BAFTA Cymru. We have also recruited and trained a team to run Telling Lives, a BBC Digital Storytelling project in England.

Including our bi-lingual colleagues - remember one fifth of the population speaks Welsh - there are currently nine of us in the Capture Wales team. We are a mixture of freelancers, staffers and part-timers with just four of our number assigned to the project full-time. It's a crack team that has taken three years to build.

Each month we take our portable lab out on the road. It might be to a language centre, a hotel conference room, an IT unit, the back room of a pub, a village hall, a centre for the physically disabled, a miners' institute or library, an arts centre, a college, a school, or a leisure centre where we facilitate ten people at a time in the making of Digital Stories. In workshops where

everyone proceeds together through the production process, participants write their own scripts, create their own images, record their own voices, edit their own stories on computers and then we screen the finished results.

Capture Wales might look like a neat device for generating web and television content, but first and foremost it's about community building, about that workshop process. At the beginning I based the delivery of our workshops closely on the CDS model (see Digital Storytelling Cookbook). However, because we work so much with cross-generational mixed ability groups - deliberately involving participants who are completely new to computers - and because we quickly came to realise how important it is to share storytelling as well as technical skills, I ended up reworking the entire delivery, spreading it over five days (rather than three), and breaking it down into lots of small steps through which we can all progress together. It is strictly non-competitive with team members constantly making light of the many difficulties and doing their best to ensure that all the participants discover how much fun all this can be. Inevitably I found I had to make my own training film (called Scissors) and also write my own workshop manual (now available online at Photobus ).

Capture Wales's Digital Stories reveal an "invisible nation". Photographs which, until now, have been tucked into drawers and cupboards or taped into scrapbooks and family albums, come out of the shadows, spark memory, and strike a light on the screen like a "diamond balanced on a blade of grass" (Tom Waits) or a "jewel hung in ghastly night" (Shakespeare).

In a Digital Story, photographs discover the talkies, and the stories told assemble in the ether as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a gaggle of invisible histories which, when viewed together, tell the bigger story of our time, the story that defines who we are. The Wales of Capture Wales is not

just the media cliché post-industrial Wales of pit closures, redundant workers, quaint folk in pointy hats, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Catherine Zeta Jones, and picturesque hillsides covered in sheep. For Digital Stories tell about Wales from the inside. We deal in all sorts:

Joanne's obsession with her shoes;

Gaynor's relationship with her son;

Nikisha coming to terms with obesity;

Debbie escaping the fear of violence.

Paul viewing the world from his terraced house;

Graham remembering an old friend;

Michael celebrating a life of running;

Tony impressing his father with a lobster.

These stories may not have the production values of conventional broadcast TV but they do have a compelling scrapbook aesthetic which is entirely their own. Invariably revealing, these tales most certainly could not be told in any other way.

In November 2002 Digital Stories hit television for the first time and Capture Wales now has a regular midweek slot on the digital channel BBC2W. They also appear on BBC1 Wales's regular evening news magazine programme Wales Today.

Our work these past three years has sparked off a number of independent Digital Storytelling clubs and centres across Wales. There is one at the Blackwood Miners' Institute in the valleys, and another in the north at Yale College, Wrexham. Now Digital Stories are being made by people who have never been anywhere near a BBC workshop. What's more these stories can be

scheduled for TV viewing, the first of them will go out this summer. With accelerated expansion, it is my hope - no, let's be optimistic, it is my expectation - that within a few short years, Wales will take its place as the world's first nation of kitchen table film makers. The people will be making their own TV.

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