Surfaces and Soundings: A Digital Story by Bob King

In this post I divide my 'leave it all on the page' version of my story into three discreet scenes. Reformatting a story into scenes in this way is something the folks at StoryCenter recommend for digital storytellers, given that the output of a digital storytelling process is, at the end of the day, a film. Writing in scenes makes for a good next step in the direction of writing for film. Divvying up a story into scenes also makes good compositional sense in that doing so helps keep things organized and concise. This makes a story easier for an audience to follow, and kind of gently forces an author/director to be clear. The 'scenification' process also enables a more 'cinematic' mode of thinking to be enfolded into the process. Cinematic thinking involves blending all of the story elements (text, spoken text, image, sonic content, and moving images) together, in concert so to speak, within a series of coherent scenes that, taken together, add up in the end ...

For me writing a script is mainly a process of distillation. After generating a 'leave it all on the page' written draft, writing a script involves getting the storyline(s) worked out in a kind of finely honed way. I am cognizant also that the script will function, at times anyway, as a set of guardrails. For example I have quite a bit of experience writing presentation slideshow content, and I know from that experience that the way I actually speak the content orally when I rehearse it inevitably involves improvisation; the core points remain, but the actual oral delivery changes. And this is something I anticipate occurring in my digital storytelling project as well. So I figure my script will serve as a place for me to hone the exact narrative I want to tell, then the next stage -- recording and producing the oral narration -- will involve an immersion in semi-improvisational orality.  Since digital storytelling is an oral genre, it makes sense that orality sort of gets ...

After considerable effort, I identified four stories to choose from. I mean C onsiderable E ffort. It was not easy for me to come up with four stories that a person would need to know if they wanted to truly know me. I initially thought of telling my story of attending a three-day silent Meditation Retreat. The story of going to a UCLA basketball game with an uncle of mine when I was in high school is another one worth telling I think, and it dovetails with a lot of my life being wrapped up in sports. The story of my son Andrew's last game pitching in Greensboro is another of my sports stories worth telling, as is the story of my eldest son's time in the neonatal intensive care unit when he was born. A train trip story in childhood -- the family bombing across the country from Los Angeles to Chicago on the Santa Fe El Capitan, then on to Pennsylvania on lesser rides, but no matter, all in all a fun adventure and a worthwhile story. And a relationship story, the one with Joyce i...