Quillstress

Well, here I am, weeks behind on responses to the workshops I’ve attended because…well, I’ve been attending a lot of workshops, getting ready for others, and reading all sorts of books in between. Aside from that, I go on Anarchy-Online or Oblivion and kill things. That’s pretty much my summer…with a few respites at the Lake and taking my labrador to the park just to get fresh air in my lungs.

Anyway, first let me comment on the Digital Storytelling Workshop and then I’ll move on to the Graphic Novel sessions I attended this week.

Digital Storytelling was the main reason this has become a marathon summer. This was the invitation that started it all, so I’ve been preparing for it since May. I had at least four ideas coming into it that I wanted to try. One was to tell one of my “short” stories…possibly one about an ogress or one of the “backstory” legends of the world I write about, almost as though my main character were telling the story to one of her grandchildren. Another idea I had was to do a flash “travelogue” of the regions and cultures of the people in my novels as a way of “cementing” details and atmosphere down for myself. The third idea grew out of the “Places” theme of the Digital Writing Marathon and I thought I could tell the stories of my “magic” woods and how my childhood places lead me into writing. Lastly I had an idea about some trees that grew near one of those “magic” woods that I called the Wedded Oaks and how they paralleled the story of my grandparents.

Due to a strange glitch in settings created by using my DSL providers software, Moviemaker wouldn’t work…I spent six hours with HP support and two more hours with the GeekSquad to confirm the fact that they didn’t know what to do except wipe the drive…which I did. Starting fresh from scratch is a nice clean feeling, but it’s a pain trying to get everything back to “normal”. [Even now iTunes is convinced this isn't the same computer, has authorized this same machine three times (leaving me only two authorizations left) and won't confirm the licenses on any of the musicI bought from their music store , so I had to do all the tags to my library manually...twice, since it had to go in Mediaplayer after iTunes just refused to run any of it.] So, I rebuilt…and then I went surfing…a lot. I surfed the net so long looking for materials for my stories that I actually touched the end of cyberspace. In case you’re interested, it’s just outside the nexus created between The Bat Segundo Show, the law of the playground, and Abe Vagoda.
So, I went into the workshop with a PC packed with images and things I’d gleaned, from CC licensed photos to free sound files…a dozen sites bookmarked in Firefox to search for more if I needed them and…..I was ready!

Well, I was…until….

First complication:

We are using only iMovie, so I can’t use my pc or anything I found or learned. (Oookay.)

Second complication:

High schools don’t use Macs except in Art departments, so I’ll never use anything I learn on one to teach. (uhh?)

Third complication:

Macs really stink. (grrrrrrrrrrrr…stop saving already….no, now save. Why is my entire project in the trash? Why can’t I get it out? Why don’t you have a pentagram engraved on the top instead of that innocent looking apple? Now I hate apples. Why is there never a cider press around when you need one?)

Fourth complication:

iMovie stinks worse than Macs. (What the….I only put you on the tool bar for two seconds! How did you scramble my entire timeline so quickly? What do you mean, where’s my soundtrack? You had it and an hour of my level changes to boot.)

Fifth complication:

Due to previous complications, waiting an entire day to get my “voice” recording, and having to change my project twice to work with Mac (file sharing…or not sharing, etc.) I’m a day behind, conservatively, and I only have two and a half days.

I spend an evening drawing just one of the “trees” I envisioned using in my piece called “The Wedded Oaks” since I can’t get my photos to move around with a flash drive. Thankfully I have the pictures of my grandparents (some) on a CD that a Mac can read. At the workshop, the scanner won’t read my drawing to either the mac or my pc, so I take digital photos of it and Apple likes Sony, so I have a picture. One. So I take more pictures of my drawing…cropping this and that and then start slapping them down on the timeline in Moviemaker along side the pictures of my grandparents story….soon I have the whole thing synced with the voice where I want voice…I’ve written the “text” parts on to tree drawings using the Title editor and all I need is one more picture to fill in the void where something didn’t work. I minimize iMovie so I can snag it from the CD and when I open iMovie again…my entire project is scrambled. I don’t mean it shifted down the timeline a little here or there, or that the voice and photos got out of alignment, I mean scrambled. Jigsaw-pieces-on-the-floor scrambled.

I finally get it all back together…I won’t even tell you what it took to get my soundtrack music pulled in…that took a day even when I had the actual CD and not a file. (I had to turn the computer off and on again three times to put CD’s in and take them out at this point since there’s no manual release on a Mac drive.) But I get the entire project done..all the voice and music levels adjusted just so over the transitionless graphics (since Ken Burns was annoying enough and I’d run out of time)…and burn it to DVD.

Wait an hour…then copy it to the workshops external drive…then prepare to demo.

The other teachers demos look so good, they’re all so clever and beautifully done. I dread even showing mine…it wasn’t what I had envisioned, not even close. I also hate the sound of my own voice and feel my story is too “mushy”. But it’s important…at least to me, that the story be told. So I turn on the dvd….

Well, the music completely obliterates the voiced parts. People can read the “tree” part of the story, but haven’t a clue what I said about my grandparents. They’re all very polite (they’re teachers, you know), but it was soooooo bad. I couldn’t understand what went wrong, I’d worked almost two hours getting all the volume levels just right. I go back to the computer just two minutes from boiling over, and I discover the Mac hadn’t taken my last four saves. (I had saved about every fifteen/twenty minutes toward the end…out of shear paranoia.) To make matters worse, when I go to open iMovies from where it is minimized after having shuffled the project file from the desktop to the workshops external drive, it tells me the project is in the trash. (again, this was the second time) This time it won’t let me have it back…not anyway that I tried or anyone else suggested. So, I turned it off and packed it up. I stuck the demo DVD in the folder with my blank CD’s, it’s a nice coaster. I’m using it now, in fact. Sitting behind it is the picture of the oaks that I drew. Did I mention that the very day I took pictures of the drawing I was walking back to my car and it started to downpour? Torrential is the word, I think. Anyway, when I got home the picture had inky black tearmarks staining it. Kind of sums it up, doesn’t it? lol

Well, the project was a loss, but the workshop wasn’t. I have a few rules I learned.

Rule the First of Digital Storytelling:

Don’t you DARE ask your students to do anything you can’t. That means checking out ALL hardware and software BEFORE you entertain such a notion. If you haven’t done three or four projects with the same equipment and technology as you’ll have available to students, let them draw doodles on the edges of paper for a grade before you put them through this.

Rule the Second of Digital Storytelling:

Stuff happens. Often. Repeatedly. Sound familiar? Digital Storytelling does not allow hard deadlines or other rigidity in terms of time. If you think it will take two days, it will take five. Stuff happens and if you’re not technologically savvy, then you better have someone on call who is…’cause stuff happens.

Rule the Third of Digital Storytelling:

Vision is everything. Every bump in the road that compromises a student’s vision kills their enthusiasm. If you have a student who sees it a certain way, be prepared to invest as much into making it happen as he/she does.

Well, it was enlightening and extremely frustrating. Enough said, though I would like to thank Pearson and the Bay Area Writing Project for facilitating this workshop. The possiblities are so awesome, but realities are such a pain. lol