Hard to believe, but in just seven days we will welcome our students to Digital Storytelling’s Fall Workshop. We’re ready to get started!

Some of the things I’ve been thinking about as we complete our preparations for next Tuesday:

• The power of the human voice
• The importance of excellent sound in recordings (viewers will forgive mediocre visuals, but never bad sound quality)
• The amazing discovery of the green (or blue) screen, also known as chroma key, which allows filmmakers to create different backgrounds after the scene has been filmed

We’ll cover all of these and much more in the six-week workshop starting September 25 at the Emerald Art Center in Springfield.

We’re getting ready for the Fall Workshop! We’re finishing the curriculum, upgrading software, making sample videos, and all of the dozens of tasks that still need to be finished. In the meantime, here’s the story of film pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché, whose contributions to film were almost forgotten.

ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ, FILM PIONEER

According to a report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, “Women comprised just 7 percent of all directors working
on the 250 highest-grossing domestic releases in 2016, a decline of two percentage points from the level achieved in 2015 and in 1998.” (Variety, 1/12/17.)

This lack of women film directors wasn’t always the case.

Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) was a French-American filmmaker, director, screenwriter, producer and actress. She was one of the first female film directors, and, at age 23, made her first feature film. She was a pioneer in synching sound to moving film, made the earliest known film starring an all-African American cast, and was the first woman to build and run a film studio.

Alice’s first film was titled La Fée aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages) and was the first, if not one of the first, narrative films. Before Alice, most films weren’t stories; Alice changed that with La Fée. She also insisted that her actors “be natural,” a departure from the style of over-acting common at the time.

Between 1896 and 1920, Alice directed over 1,000 films. In spite of this achievement, she was almost completely forgotten until recently, when director Pamela Green released Be Natural,  a documentary about Alice’s life.

For more information about women pioneers in film, visit the Women Film Pioneers Project.

Sign up here for Digital Storytelling’s Fall Workshop.

Digital Storytelling of the Pacific Northwest is the daughter of Media Poetry Studio, an arts-based educational program for teen girls that started in 2014. Here’s the story of how Media Poetry Studio came to be:

In the Spring of 2014, California Bay Area Poets Laureate Erica Goss, Jennifer Swanton Brown and David Perez had an epiphany while discussing their plans as community poets. We wanted to reach out to young people, to involve them in creative writing, and make opportunities for them in the literary arts. Over several discussions, we developed a two-week summer camp for teen girls, one where they learned how to make short films based on their own poems. We called it Media Poetry Studio, and our students’ work can be viewed here.

In 2017, Erica moved to Eugene, Oregon, and began Digital Storytelling of the Pacific Northwest. We offer a summer camp and workshops throughout the school year. Our first Fall Workshop for Teen Girls begins on Tuesday, September 25, 2018.

Our mission: We empower young women to find their voices though filmmaking and literary art.

Our values and community focus: We value each student’s unique voice, talents, and abilities. Our workshop is a safe, supportive community for girls to experiment with creative writing and technology. We give students the opportunity to tell their stories and show us what they think and feel.

You can sign your daughter up here.

Please contact Erica Goss, Director, if you have any questions.

Hi! In this post, I’ll share the first week’s lesson plan for Digital Storytelling of the Pacific Northwest’s Fall Workshop, and help explain our girls-only focus.

In every workshop:

• 5-minute freewrite. Students write on daily topic.
• Discussion regarding writing.
• Instruction on an aspect of movie-making.
• Time to experiment and work on projects.

Week 1, 9/25/18

• Which stories do you want to tell? Some possibilities:
  • How-to: show us how to make something
  • Interview: interview yourself or someone else
  • Poetry: write a poem and use it as the text for a video
  • Story: use a story from your life or one you make up as the basis for a video

• Video Skills.
  • Intro to filming using the Lumix GH4 and G7 cameras
    • Basic camera skills
    • Lighting, ISO, shutter speed, aperture setting
    • Tripods vs. monopods
    • Downloading video to hard drive

Digital Storytelling of the Pacific Northwest is designed as a girls-only workshop. We want our female students to be center stage, without gender-based competition. Studies show that girls tend to shy away from technology in middle school, just as boys are gaining mastery: “many girls’ interest in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math wanes as they get older because of socialization and lack of exposure and access.”

We have to teach girls that technology can offer them a lot and it’s not very hard to use—they’re using it all the time. At Digital Storytelling of the Pacific Northwest, we teach them to create art that they can be really proud of.

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We’re happy to hold Digital Storytelling’s Fall Workshop at the Emerald Art Center in Springfield. The workshop will occur upstairs in the Mary Meeker Classroom. The Emerald Art Center is located at 500 Main Street in downtown Springfield. The Center includes galleries, workshops and classes for all ages, and a gift shop.

We can’t wait to get started!

Sign up here for our Fall Workshop for Teen Girls.

Telling stories and craft-making are two healthy, creative activities that benefit teen girls, helping them gain confidence in their abilities and encouraging them to try new things. One of the options we offer our students at Digital Storytelling of the Pacific Northwest is instruction in making the how-to or demonstration video.

My video “The Fairy House” is an example of a how-to, story-telling video. The inspiration came from a newspaper story about Theresa Ojibway, a woman from New Jersey who makes fairy houses. She makes tiny beds, chairs, ladders, and doors from natural materials, and leaves them in parks for children to find.

Theresa Ojibway’s story inspired me to create a video about a woman who makes fairy furniture. Over a two-week period in the summer of 2016, I did the following:

• researched photographs of Ms. Ojibway’s creations,
• made my own versions with twigs, glue, twine, fabric, and craft-store items,
• wrote the screenplay,
• filmed myself in my backyard.

It was an extremely enjoyable project, as it allowed me to fulfill the roles of screenwriter, actor (just my hands!), set designer, prop builder, videographer, editor, and producer. The only task I gave to someone else was that of narrator. A former student of mine allowed me to record her telling the story of the Fairy House. (My son painted the fairy-mobile.)

I filmed the scenes with redwood trees in a park near my house, and since it was summer, I had to deal the hard bright light. I used various settings in Adobe Premiere’s Lumetri Color to get the dreamy, brownish look of an old book or postcard. For the furniture-building scenes, I covered a plastic table with brown postal paper and shot some of the scenes through pots of flowers.

I have lots of “blooper” video, times when the wind scattered my carefully arranged twigs, or the fragile, twiggy furniture kept falling over, or when my dog, who appears at the end, refused to stay on camera. I’ve often thought of making a video of just those scenes!

Enrollment is open.

Warmly,

Erica

Erica Goss

Founder and Director

Digital Storytelling of the Pacific Northwest

I’m happy to have a post from our instructor, Kacie Clark! Kacie writes about the need for healthy communities for teen girls, and how to help them feel valued and included.

Now that I’m expecting my own child, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reflecting on my childhood and adolescence, and how I can help my child navigate through the inevitable rough patches that the teenage years, in particular, may bring.

The word “community” keeps reoccurring to me: community regarding feeling a sense of belonging, of kinship. I think one of the hardest parts of being a teenager is feeling like you’re alone in the universe; that you’re the only person like you and no one else can understand your struggles and your story. Having a place to create and nourish friendships with like-minded people would have been a huge boon for me.

At Digital Storytelling of the Pacific Northwest, creating this sense of community is both integral to and inherent in the classes we teach: we encourage cooperation and trust between our girls to help foster the bonds of friendship and inclusion. We learn together, motivate and assist each other, and work together on our projects to create beautiful and meaningful pieces of art.

As late author Susan Vreeland wrote:

“Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.”

In our classes, we ask our girls what they want to say to the world, what they want to share. By working together in a community, by creating ties to one another, one girl’s voice becomes many, becomes determined and strong.

Enrollment is open. 

Kacie

Kacie Clark, Instructor, Digital Storytelling of the Pacific Northwest