DEMO DIGITAL STORY – This is What a Lesbian Looks Like

A Digital Story by Amy Goodloe

This project is an example of a CDS-style digital storytelling project, which is one of your options for a video project.

In June 2012, I participated in a Center for Digital Storytelling workshop that gave me the opportunity to produce a new version of the story below, to better serve as an example for students in my WRTG 3020 class on the Rhetoric of Gender, Sexuality, and New Media, given that they would be working on such a project themselves (exploring their own emerging awareness of their gender and/or sexual orientation identities).

This version, which has images as well as an audio voiceover, is much closer to what students might produce for a digital storytelling project. So I made it primarily to serve as a demo, but this is by no means the end of the story!

The example also illustrates a technique that might be of interest to other digital storytellers: using screencasting to capture a live drawing on an iPad. I couldn’t find images to illustrate one small part of my story, so instead I projected my iPad screen onto my MacBook and used Camtasia to record the screen as I drew a simple stick figure in Art Studio on the iPad.

As you can see, I can’t draw, but no one expects digital stories to be produced by professional artists. However, if you can draw, this might be a particularly creative way to illustrate your story, especially if you sped up the recording a bit.

EARLIER VERSION

I made the first version around 2010, as my first effort at showing students how to work with images, transitions, and captions in iMovie. The video served as a demo of those techniques, not as an example of the digital storytelling projects they would be producing, but the “photo slideshow” still told a story of sorts.

Something I realized later: I should’ve clarified that the dates on the opening screen refer to the time frame for the photos (and the story they tell), not my life span!