Digital storytelling pilot – Cape Town

As part of a series of pilots of our Digital storytelling methodology, the University of the Western Cape ran two workshops with a social enterprise in Cape Town, Macassar Pottery.  The first event took place at the pottery itself, with a story circle comprised of UWC staff and a masters student, three  potters and Johan de Meyer, the Director of the pottery and former journalist.

Having established the story circle concept, the participants were allowed 15-20 minutes each to tell their stories, including time for questions.  Ntombi, a UWC masters student, started with the story of how using Google resulted in her deciding to study computer studies.  McKay told his story, which he named ‘In my ma se skoene’ (In my Mother’s Shoes).  The storytellers then set about writing down their stories and also discussed with Andre Daniels from UWC what kind of mobile phones they had. It was noticeable that two participants had smartphones, but at entry level, while the third had a feature phone.  None had either enough memory to download the app we wanted to use, nor did they have enough data in their accounts.

The second session took place on campus at UWC, in the Co-Lab space.  This workshop kicked off with a recap from the previous meeting several weeks back and an explanation on how to create a digital story.

There was a slight hiccup as the participants had forgotten to bring their written stories from the pottery, however they had brought some photographs on their phones which were duly uploaded to Dropbox. The UWC facilitators used their phones – iPhones – to record two of the participants’ stories and these audio files were also added into Dropbox.

Since one of the storytellers could not read or write, André from UWC helped him record his story to his (Andre’s) phone without using a written script.  He then sat with each participant and used iMovie to compile their stories, starting with the voice recording and then added the photographs. Subsequently he added the music of their choice and added some text.

Here is McKay’s story, ‘In my Mother’s Shoes’.

A celebration event to ‘premiere’ the stories from this workshop will be held soon at Macassar Pottery.