Grade Weight: 15%
Peer Review Deadline: Wednesday, June 2nd
Open Lab Hours: Thursday, June 3rd 9:45-1:00 (class on Thursday will be online)
Due Date/Presentation Day: Monday, June 7th
Medium: Digital story combining audio narration, music, images, video, and effects.
Description: For your second project you will compose a 5-7 minute family or local history story that combines an audio narrative with music, images, (possibly) video, and effects to support that narrative. If you choose to compose a family history story, don't attempt to tell your complete family history. Instead, focus on the story of a single family member, on a single story that is significant to you or your family, on a family ritual or important place or thing, or on a series of stories that illustrate something important about your family history. You may narrate the entire story yourself, include the voices of family members who are central to that story, or permit one key person to narrate this tale for you. If you write a local history, you will want to focus on one or two significant events; trace the origin of an event, activity, celebration, or landmark; or re-tell a legend. You may narrate the entire story yourself, include voices of the people who were involved in or remember the event, or find some key figure to narrate for you.
Requirements: your story must be about 5 minutes long and it cannot be longer than 7 minutes, so compose your audio narrative carefully and choose images, music, video clips, and effects that will help you tell a rich and interesting story. You must have a draft ready for peer review on Wednesday, June 2nd. We will have an online class on Thursday, June 3rd, but I will be in the 400A lab from 9:45-1:00 on that day if you want to come in to work on your project and/or get some feedback on it from me. You are also required to submit an analytical cover letter detailing and explaining the work you did on this project, the decisions you made, and the changes you might make to this work in future. You must upload this digital story to your YouTube page and link to that YouTube page from our class Wiki. Your story must be original, a real story about your family history or about some aspect of local history, composed entirely by you. Your images and music cannot be copyright protected: all must be your own productions (your photos, music you created), within the public domain, or covered in some way under other fair use guidelines (remember our class discussion about this).
Special Challenges to Consider: you will be interviewing and (possibly) recording people in your family, remember your ROHA protocol training and let them tell the story without your intervention. You will need to incorporate family photos, audio, music, film/video, and effects. Making smooth transitions between the various media will be crucial. Also, since you'll be dealing with audio, balancing the volume on the music and audio narration will be a challenge. Most of the first projects I see live or die based on noise levels alone. You will probably want to mix your audio file (music and narration) first, before you begin production on the movie itself.