Alternative Storytelling

We recently had an extremely interesting lecture from Dan Meadows.

Dan Meadows was a journalist who worked for Granada and Media Wales. Despite a successful career in journalism I suspect he would take more pride in being known a  ‘documentarist’. He currently teaches at Cardiff University where he spreads the good word of digital story telling.

Dan Meadows says: “Digital Stories — when properly done — can be tight as sonnets: multimedia sonnets from the people. Short, personal and written with feeling there’s a strictness to their construction: 250 words, a dozen or so pictures, and two minutes is about the right length.”

Dan Meadows uses photos and narration to tell a story. His website, photobus.co.uk, showcases much of his work. The piece entitled ‘scissors’ is a perfect example of how to use modes different from the written word to tell a story.

Dan started on this path very early in his career. When he finished University he set out across the country in a double-decker bus. He took photos of people, developed them and handed them out for free. Because it was an exercise of freedom and expression he never recorded the names of his subjects.

We were then tasked with creating some digital stories of our own. Here is Fiona Roberts‘ digital story – Sloightly on the huh.

My own attempt was slightly less orthodox.  Me and my co-conspirator, James Franklin, set out to make some mischief. With an inability to take ourselves seriously our plans quickly degenerated and what we were left with was pretty stupid. Nevertheless we forged on and cobbled something together.

Our piece is not pure photos as Dan suggests, instead we used a fair amount of video.

For this we apologise to Dan and hope he can forgive us. We did listen Dan, we just got a little carried away!

So… Here we are. How to be a modern journalist: