Digital Storytelling Is Everywhere

Since I started taking a digital storytelling class with Dr. Stacey Patton I noticed examples everywhere.

This one got me in the feels. I dropped my youngest off at college on August 23 and I worry. 

Emery Bergmann created this video with Adobe Premiere in 2017 for a digital media class homework assignment during her freshman year at Cornell. 

Bergmann, then 17 and a Fine Arts major from Montclair, New Jersey, was given the challenge to depict a “transformation” for her class. “I knew I would only enjoy making the video if the subject I was showing was something I had strong feelings about,” Bergmann explained.

Click here to read the original story.

Hold Me Accountable

Whenever I am afraid to start one of digital storytelling homework projects I ask myself:

1. What exactly am I afraid of about this project?

2. What are the components of this project?

3. What else do I need to build this project?

4. How long will it take me to build this project?

Then I get started. My biggest problem is FINISHING. I get stuck before the finishing mode. My biggest hurdle is PERFECTION.

I found this bark during a walk in Natick, Massachusetts on September 9, 2021. Photo by Robin Sallie

I have started each project each week that I was enrolled in Dr. Stacey Patton’s Sunday night class — plus 4 more since class ended — and have only completed and published 3.

I need an accountability partner. Anyone interested in meeting once a week on zoom to learn Digital Storytelling?

My goals are

1. Finishing the 6 projects I have started

2. Go through the class again using the recordings doing each project again

3. Start and complete some sort of quick, freestyle project each week

4. Take the class again in the winter

5. Teach someone else how to do all the projects.

Yesterday I took a few photos to start freestyle project. Today I will finish the project.

A Natural Renewal

Jobs often provide benefits of which the folks in human resources office are unaware.

I work at the Rivers School, a coed private day school that serves grades 6-12 on 23 acre campus, located 15 miles from Boston with 900 feet of frontage on picturesque Nonesuch Pond in Weston, Massachusetts.

During the school year, I coach basketball, substitute teach and manage the rentals of the numerous fields, buildings and the 30 acre camp grounds across the pound. 

Summers are quiet, lazy and full of nature. Often I see deer, bobcats, foxes, herons, skunks, owls, hawks and golden eagles.