Digital Narratives of two technophobes

The above masterpiece was created by me and a fellow Journalism student Eleni Cashell in an effort to knock our technophobic hands into shape. Two gruelling three-hour sessions shooting and editing a story later, we realised it was rather easier than we thought . Unlike in our first Online Journalism workshop, we didn’t break the camera this time.

All we used were
- Still cameras on two Nokia N95 mobile phones
- Audacity sound recording program
- IMovie film editing software on AppleMac computers

Simple.
But technical shenanigans aside, our project reveals a wider issue in all the mediums of Journalism. Sure it is a little rushed, takes the easy option of shooting within crawling distance of our department, and I sound like a camp CBBC presenter, but it is an attempt to show that Journalism is about stories.

It takes its inspiration from a wildly eccentric lecture from the talented photo-journalist Daniel Meadows. He showed us a collection of photographs and video stories by both professionals and ordinary people, and passionately said: “Human beings naturally have stories inside them and want to say them over and over again”.

We saw some of the groundbreaking first black and white videos from the early twentieth century, where intrigued people could barely hold back their temptation to pose and perform.

Daniel told us about the BBC project he was a part of, Capture Wales, where he went all over Wales to run five-day workshops with normal technophobic people like myself, and taught them to make simple video stories out of still pictures and their own voiceover script, just like the one above.



We were introduced to the so called “Psycho Geography” project, where people have selected an outline on a map, and walked around the real locations on the street, reporting, photographing and documenting the changing moods, experiences and people on the streets. Murmur Toronto is one such example.

The below picture was taken by Daniel Meadows in 1974, and has been reproduced over the years time and time again in various newspapers and exhibitions.

Daniel Meadows: Portsmouth: John Payne, aged 12, with two friends and his pigeon, Chequer, 26 April 1974. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre. Copyright the artist, 2007.

It featured in an exhibiton a few years ago as an example of photographs that represented the change in British society over the 60s, 70s and 80s, under the banner of a famous Margaret Thatcher phrase:

“...society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women and there are families.”


And this, for me, I feel, perhaps sums up the point of Daniel’s eclectic collection of presentations.
Photography captures people, and individuals rather than generalisations, collectiveness or broad and vague descriptions. And this extends to Journalism as a whole. Short stories can be little windows into a bigger life, and truth is to be found from individual people, with all their delightful differences. The stories they tell will never be the same.

You can write about statistics or wide groups of society, but what really grabs people's intrest is the nitty-gritty details about one or two people in their own unique words and views.

Through my attempts to try video audio and photography, I found myself employing the same universal skill I apply to print: Journalism is about real people.

If you want to try and make a digital narrative like the one back, check out Daniel Meadow’s online tips here.