Digital Story by Timmy Church

Digital Storytelling, as a specifically developed and trademarked technique, is one of the ways in which Indigenous communities in Victoria have greatly increased access to the tools of media-making and new media forms in digital culture to tell their stories. In contrast to industrial models of media production, Digital Storytelling is a social, “grassroots” film practice, first developed in the early 1990s by artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. It draws on low-tech, digital technology to offer participants a uniquely structured workshop environment in which they can be involved in every aspect of a creative media-making process. ¹ The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), located in Melbourne (Victoria), developed one of the first Digital Storytelling programs in Australia, and currently holds one of the largest collections of digital stories worldwide. ³ In the case of supporting Indigenous content through this methodology, it makes sense for us not to take the kind of lead we do with many of our other projects, but offer more of a support role as our part in the collaboration.

Indigenous Digital Storytelling Workshop, ACMI

There’s actually quite a lot to say about the workshop process and it is, I think, the particular strength of this program. People make an incredible commitment to this process, both in terms of their time and also emotionally. I’ve worked on these projects and I’ve watched how the storytellers have struggled beyond just navigating the technology. It’s not a simple process to tell a personal narrative; so, when we have media makers come and train with us to help deliver this program, they are always asked to produce a digital story as part of the training, as a way to understand how confrontational it can be to produce this style of content. Yet, at the same time, it’s the nature of the content that makes the process so worthwhile.

Kimba Thompson:

I’ve been working with the Digital Storytelling method now for quite a while. I started with a project for Regional Arts Victoria in 2003, and then I got involved with the ACMI projects around 2006. For me, the most important thing about Digital Storytelling is working in community. It’s the “backstory” of how we actually produce these stories – going to the places where these stories come from and making the films entirely in these places – that matters most.

I can tell you a little story from a workshop in Heywood, the backstory to Grace Sailor’s Early Memories (Grace Sailor). When Grace came in to the workshop she told me she wasn’t sure what she was coming in for. She said she just got picked up by the mob [other community members] and she’d travelled forty minutes into the Heywood Aboriginal Co-op. She said, “I didn’t prepare anything”. She’d walked in with a plastic garbage bag. I just said, “That’s alright, Aunt”. ⁴ She had two photos in that bag, as well as some basket weaving, coils at different stages of being completed. She said to me, “I’m not sure what story I’ve got to tell”. I said, “You don’t have to have a story”, and then I said, “Let’s just sit down and have a yarn about it”. Anyway, she pulled out the two photos and started to tell me that she was taken away as a child and brought up in the Ballarat orphanage. But while she was telling me about that, she was holding onto the basket coils and telling me about how she met Aunty Connie who taught her to weave. So I was thinking, “OK, there’s two stories here she wants to tell. How are we going to marry them?” She wanted to tell her story of being taken away, but she didn’t want it to be a sad story. She wanted to celebrate her relationship with Aunty Connie, too. And then there was the problem of how we were going to tell these two stories with just two pictures, because rule of thumb is you need quite a few images to tell a three-minute story!

So, in the process there was an Uncle that had walked into the workshop with three photo albums. He was sitting up the back, and when we started the yarning and talking about stories we might tell, this Uncle was popping up saying, “I got a photo for that story”, and “I got a photo for this one”, and so on. One other Uncle was telling us a story about how he used to catch this bus down from Portland to Heywood, and the old Uncle goes, “Here – I got a photo of you in front of that bus”.

And while this was going on, Aunt says to me, “Maybe I could do the weaving, but I need special reeds. Aunty Connie wouldn’t let me weave with, you know, just any kind of grasses”. It was pouring down rain, but we jumped in the car to go looking for the special reeds that she needed, and Uncle (with the photo album) jumped in the car with us. I had the video camera because I thought I’d take some video footage. But then I just turned it off and sat quietly in the car with them. We went a long way out in the bush, going from one little waterhole to another with Aunt going, “No, they’re not the right reeds. No, not those ones”. So we’re driving, driving, driving and then we stopped, and I was just sitting there, silent, and Uncle said to Aunt: “By the way, Gracie, I’ve got a photo for you here, and it’s a photo of your Mum”. And everything was quiet and then, next minute, Aunt goes, “Right, just over there, those reeds”.

Soon I was in the water. I had a camera on my back and I was thinking, “Alright, I’ll just go and get the reeds, chop them from the bottom”. And then there was this beautiful moment that came over me of seeing just what had happened, and how in the process of these workshops so many people get connected. I saw how it was really the yarning that brings this out. People talking and sharing story.

Later, Aunt asked the uncle with the photo albums, “So, did you know my Dad?” And he goes, “Yeah, he was a good man”. Then Aunty says, “Alright, I am just going to tell my story”. There were (as I said) only two photos. We just didn’t know how to get around it, until I just stood there with a little Handycam and said, “Go on then, Aunt, you just yarn to me and weave away”. So pretty much those were the shots we ended up using: a close-up on her hands weaving, her face, and the coil itself. But it gave us a way to tell both of her stories: the first story she was narrating was about her culture being taken away, and her second story – these images – was about rediscovering her culture with Aunty Connie through the basket weaving, and that’s a story that she really wanted to tell … So, what I’m saying is that behind every one of these individual stories is another story about how the film was made, and that’s a story about being in the community.

Simondson:

I think it’s really important to explain that Digital Stories purposely don’t have high production values; they are produced on accessible low-end technologies and often the raw material, such as the personal photos incorporated as visuals in many stories, can often be in a terrible state. But, as Kimba says, the purpose of the program is about empowering people with the knowledge about the technology, and to assist them to tell moving-image stories that are meaningful to them – like Aunty Grace’s story, which is such a fantastic little film. Interestingly, many audiences respond strongly to the content, and I think this is because there’s an incredible integrity and intimacy in these personal narratives. I think this compensates for what might be missing in production sophistication. Increasingly the public is more comfortable with the user generated low-end aesthetic.

I also wanted to say that one of the most important roles ACMI plays in the co-creative partnership for all the individuals and partner organisations involved is to exhibit, manage and collect these titles. When we set up this program, there was a whole raft of issues we had to work through as a cultural institution to be able to manage this type of user-generated or co-creative content. The old traditional method of getting the content makers to assign the rights over was not appropriate, given the program was about empowering first-person voice through storytelling. But we still needed to ensure we had a license to be able to exhibit and collect the works, so we determined that if the copyright was vested with the storyteller, we could manage an ongoing non-exclusive license with appropriate terms of use agreed to by the storyteller, and with the right for the storyteller to revoke the license at any time. ACMI manages the title on behalf of the storyteller with any of the partners that might have permission to screen the content.

Underlying rights were also an issue. Most of the images are, as Kimba was explaining earlier, drawn from the storyteller’s personal archive, or through utilising ACMI’s significant stock library. Certainly now the approach to sharing content and the re-purposing of images is becoming much simpler through creative commons but, at the time we started the program, we solved this issue through the stock library. Music was also a problem; even though there are great software programs that help people compose their own music, we wanted to ensure we gave storytellers access to a music library, given the limitation of time in the workshop. To do this we worked with The Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA) and The Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS) to negotiate a reasonable a blanket license fee that would allow all parties to exhibit the content. The APRA and AMCOS commercial licensing arrangements are traditionally based on carving out broadcast timeslots and theatrical screenings. But we needed to negotiate a blanket licence arrangement that was not going to be prohibitive, and recognised that it was user-generated or community media, and that we wished to screen the content in non-theatrical exhibition screening environment, including online screening.

It was also crucial for us to manage the classification for these titles for exhibition. It would have been unrealistic and financially prohibitive to submit each digital story for classification, so we have applied for self-classification status, similar to a broadcaster, so this content can be screened appropriately.

As a cultural institution, we have had to ensure we have managed all licensing, cultural and rights management to exhibit and collect these works, which has been in some ways out of step with the way this type of content is exhibited via channels such as YouTube. Regardless of other organisations and individuals having a bit more freedom to take up the opportunities of these new distribution channels, ACMI has had to ensure we are compliant – and this becomes more complex as we get into online delivery of content. Even more so now that the tools available with Web 2.0 and 3.0 have provided a functionality and expectation that content delivered online can be either re-purposed or very actively engaged with. In a way, online distribution can be seen as a continuation of this co-creative process – so the issues with online distribution are becoming far are more complex.

Eades:

As an organisation, Koorie Heritage Trust is concerned with the inter-generational passing on of culture, and digital storytelling does offer one mechanism by which people can do that. So, that is the kind of interest we have in all this. The challenge with our young people, I think, is to find something that they are really interested in – because if you just go in with an old view of culture and just present it in that way, they often find it difficult to connect. You’ve got to consider the world in which they live, the things that compete for their interest. You’ve got to think about heritage in that kind of framework. Digital Storytelling and filmmaking are perfect for working through some of these big issues.