Exploring Digital Storytelling

I must say that this aspect of the ePortfolio gets me totally excited. Digital storytelling seems like just a more educational approach to making movies and after watching some examples, it seems like it would be a lot of fun to actually make one. I've only made one short film before for a film class in high school and as soon as I started watching the clips on Dr. Barrett's site, I immediately thought of my film and the process I went through of adding sound, images, voice-overs, and music. All of those components seem to fit into what digital storytelling is basically comprised of, but you get to tweak it to represent more of who you are as an individual. I can imagine myself using digital storytelling in so many different ways. The most obvious way would be using digital storytelling to describe myself and using my narration and various images of myself that would hopefully give the viewer a better understanding of who I am.

One example that I watched was titled "Jonathan" and it described a young mother's love and journey with her new son Jonathan. I think it was wonderfully done and that digital storytelling example gave me an idea of another digital storytelling video I could do. I figured that I could also do a digital storytelling of important people, places, and events in my life that have helped in changing/shaping who I have become. I think even people who do not consider themselves very creative would have a really fun time coming up with ideas of what pictures and music to add because in the end, it's really all about the person that is actually making the video and, really, what's more fun/interesting than describing yourself? I could really go all out with digital storytelling and since I already have some experience in filmmaking, I think it could make digital storytelling even just a little more sophisticated and would give me tons of much-needed confidence.