Fallos modelados en la secuencia y desactivación de sistemas

Personal Archives

Twenty-eight (28) (70%) of the digital stories to incorporate still images used material from their personal archives, including pictures taken by, of, and for them by themselves, family, friends, and professional photographers. As with many digital storytelling projects, this trend should come as no surprise. Personal photo archives are personal, easy to digitize (if they aren’t already digital), and can allow a provide of authenticity (Wu, 2009; Thumim, 2012). There is clearly still a reliance on personal archive photographs within digital storytelling. Yet while is it common to utilize still images from one’s personal archives, only five (5) (19.23%) of the projects to use video made use of videos from their personal archive. This number may increase in the coming years as people continue to capture more video footage digitally.

New Content Creation

Another point of interest is the amount of new content generated for incorporation into the digital stories. 30.61% of all videos contained newly created video, 10.2% created new still images, and 8.16% incorporated new animation. The generation of these new materials points to new trends in production techniques and available technologies for storytellers. The creation of new still images and photographs, which have long been a standard asset in digital storytelling, and which are easy to capture and manipulate was relatively low in the digital stories coded here. Participants were three times as likely to create new video content than they were to create new photographs. While it is difficult to say with certainty how these were filmed, it appears that seven (7) of the fifteen digital stories that incorporate new video footage were filmed on a mobile device or computer and that four (4) made use of video cameras positioned on tripods or other stabilizing

indicates that for participants looking to incorporate video into their projects, they could rely on technologies they likely had readily available to them. The continued growth in technologies of this nature may correspond to a continued growth of new mobile- or computer-captured video footage in future digital storytelling projects. Remarkably, four (4) participants incorporated new animation content in their digital stories. This number is almost as high as those participants who created new photographs. While this is far from a trend in the sample measured in this study, it would be beneficial to watch for the continued incorporation of animation techniques within future digital storytelling projects.

Vlogs

One trend the authors noted in the videos was speaking directly into the camera as is common in YouTube vlogs. Six (6) of the videos engaged in this kind of direct communication with the audience. Two (2) of those storytellers edited in cuts to still images and one (1) of those two overlaid still images on top of the video. While this may seem like a small number, amounting to only 12.24% of the total sample size, it is important to note that all six of these videos were developed in the online course, increasing the instance of this storytelling style to 26.08% when compared solely to the other publicly available videos from that iteration of the project. The six videos that utilize this storytelling structure appear to have filmed their stories either on desktop or laptop computers or on a mobile device. While a few of the storytellers added still images to their videos, only one (1) added music, but four (4) added a title and/or text to their video, although none of them included credits. In addition to the few instances where still images were added to the digital story and broke up the video, only two (2) of these storytellers used transitions to move from video segment to video segment. This means, little to no storyline editing took place for these six videos. Yet they adequately model the YouTube vlog storytelling genre, where storytellers are likely to create videos, either scripted or unscripted, of them talking directly into the camera (Vivienne 2016). Importantly, this trend may be especially evident in this iteration of the I Am UCF project, because the course was taught online.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

Another technique used by thirteen (13) out of the forty-nine (49) students was to “break the fourth wall”. For the purposes of this study, “breaking the fourth wall” is interpreted very broadly as including any kind of direct address to the audience. Students used this technique either directly through speaking to the camera (in those stories that included students within the frame, “talking-head” style), or via verbal address to the audience through voiceover comments such as “You will have plans, but don’t forget” or “You might think that…” In the voiceover use of direct address, in particular, such a technique was used most often to convey a moral to the audience.

Popular/Mass Culture References and Influences

Popular and/or mass culture appeared to influence a number of the stories as well, albeit in different ways. While memes made an appearance in two (2) stories, direct address to the camera (perhaps reminiscent of YouTube videos and vlogs (discussed elsewhere) appeared in six (6). In addition, images and film clips from popular culture played a direct role in three (3) stories. One story, about Barack Obama’s election in 2008, included pictures of the election-night television screen, as well as an image of Obama literally

“dropping the mic” at a White House correspondents’ dinner. The latter was used as a figurative illustration of her voice over narration about her success in gaining entry to UCF. Another story incorporated a number of very short film clips, only one of which could be positively identified (the scene in Psycho in which Norman Bates’ mother is revealed to be a skeleton used to illustrate a feeling of horror being described in the voice over), and two others used a film clip from the Game of Thrones and a picture from the Harry Potter movies, respectively. Finally, a third story used imagery from the Casey Anthony murder trial to illustrate the boredom the student described in her voice over of a time she was stuck in bed while sick.

Music

Nine (9) students used identifiable and copyrighted music, including works from famous recording artists as well as music from feature films, within their digital stories. Some of these students used multiple pieces within a single video. The use of copyrighted music (despite explicit instruction to avoid this and provision of alternative, non-copyright music resources) certainly resonates with media and literacy scholars such as Godwin-Jones (2012), who points out the different attitude of younger media consumers and producers toward copyright (witness the “no copyright infringement is intended” sprinkled across YouTube, intended perhaps as a magical copyright infringement elixir?). More broadly, it would seem to resonate with a larger trend toward so-called “remix” culture in digital youth media practice (Seneviratne and Monroy-Hernandez 2010).

Editing Techniques

Overall, it seems that a significant number (19) of the digital stories in this research sample rely on the slide-show-esque format showing a succession of digitized still images. In addition, at least two (2) of the digital stories could be argued to stop the story part- way through and conclude with an ending section consisting entirely of personal photos accompanied by music (vacation stories tend to lend themselves particularly to this approach, at least in some students’ minds).

According to the data, it appears that thirteen (13) of the forty-nine (49) digital stories used a variation on the so-called “Ken Burns” effect (involving panning and/or zooming within or across a still image). This number was somewhat surprising, as these basic editing techniques are among the first shown to beginning digital storytellers and are foundational in many digital stories archived through repositories such as StoryCenter. A handful of stories appeared to use a “kitchen-sink” approach to effects--combining a large number of effects in one story. The data has not been correlated directly to a specific video platform used (although this has been noted as something to track in the future), but it is hypothesized that such students may have been in fact using the WeVideo platform introduced during the digital storytelling curriculum trainings (other students chose other editing software). WeVideo is known for the variety of “drag-and-drop” effects and transitions it offers novice video editors. Beyond the basic cross-fade or cross-dissolve transition choices, clear trends or patterns in transitions were not apparent from this particular (rather small) sample.

An interesting editing alternative, discussed earlier in the paper, was to eschew traditional editing of videos and instead film a desk or similar space where hand-drawn animation could be performed for the camera, or over which a camera could move to reveal the

contents of a book. A final, interesting alternative to traditional digital story “Ken Burns- esque” editing approaches was the choice in one video to shoot the storyteller’s journey point-of-view style--showing the typical spaces of a “day in the life.”

2.3. Limitations

The samples used in this research came from three different iterations of the I Am UCF project. Each of these sessions had a different lead facilitator, which might have affected how digital storytelling as a genre was framed, how the projects were developed, and the expectations placed on the student-storytellers. The authors recognize, for instance, that the twenty-three (23) videos from the “Interpersonal Effectiveness and Group Psychotherapy” course were created in an online course and did not engage in the physical interpersonal interdisciplinary creative approaches of the pilot study or the “Writing Across Difference” course (see Underberg-Goode et. al., forthcoming). Additionally, with the exception of five (5) projects created for the volunteer pilot study, the videos were created as graded course assignments.

The findings presented in this analysis represent a sample of the assets and editing processes coded and further, what could be coded. The authors incorporated a sample of the data they thought might be most beneficial to this audience in this paper. The authors recognize that outside researchers might code these or other videos looking for different assets and processes that could also show the media influences of university students. The sample size (49) used in this research, which consists only of those videos made publicly available is relatively small compared to the number of students who completed digital stories at the University of Central Florida during this time. A larger sample size would ensure a more representative distribution of the UCF population. Further, it remains that the research samples came from a single project, I Am UCF. There is limited research on production and media ecology, like this study does; combining this work with a similar studies of other university digital storytelling projects in diverse locations would help further the findings presented here, pointing to trends and anomalies within this project and current digital storytelling practices by similarly-aged university students.