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Helen Simondson

Helen Simondson manages a digital storytelling programme as part of Screen Education at the Australian Center for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia. She is also an Organizing Board Member of the Digital Storytelling Association. Read about Digital Storytelling.

Would you tell us a little about the project background?

We have been conducting Digital Storytelling workshops since March to specific community groups through a program we have funded.  Our funding comes to us through the government body that funds arts/health & communities known as VicHealth - it is very much a community development funding model with the views community and peoples connection with community as crucial to improving health generally.
The specific community development arm of the Digital Storytelling program and another program we run often together known as Digital Diaries is through a funded model we will also offer Digital Storytelling workshops to the public. Our Digital Studio will be completed soon so we have not delivered the program to the General Public until it is completed and fully tested.
With the funding we received from Vic Health - that I mentioned above - we set up a project entitled Telling Stories Building Communities - using ACMI's already established Digital Storytelling and Digital Diaries program -  to date we have worked with Alzheimer's association of Australia, the Heart Foundation, a group of young African boys that live in an inner city suburb of Melbourne who are learning hip hop & rap and a program with young women between 15 - 25 who are @ risk - this program is known as Girl Story which is set up through the YMCA.  We have also worked with residents of another inner city suburb to tell their story. In all with the Telling Stories; building communities project we will work with 7 community groups or key associations that have access to the identified communities. This project is due to finish mid year next year.
We are also working with 3 other community groups through the funded program and have funds from various organisations to achieve this  - we are about to go into an indigenous nursing home to collect stories from the indigenous elders who are residents in the home. We are working with a regional group and we are also a group of social workers who work with kids.

Prior to developing the Digital Storytelling program for ACMI had you or any of your staff/team members had experience on other such projects? Or how did you learn about Digital Storytelling?

I learnt about Digital Storytelling when I was working on another project for the organization- which was then known as Cinemedia - It has since been split to form The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) - The Performing Arts Multimedia Library Pilot Project (PAML) was the project I presented when I saw the Digital Storytelling presentation.
I was part of an International conference & Joe Lambert who is one of the Directors of the Centre for Digital Storytelling was the convener. Joe showed me the Digital Storytelling program and I was immediately impressed by the production level achieved by non-media makers and the integrity and power of Ist person autobiographical stories created by people using Digital Storytelling as a medium of expression.
At the time I saw the Digital Storytelling program Cinemedia was building the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Federation Square and had plans to create a Digital Studio as a facility to run programs for communities, schools and public to make their own media.
ACMI has a screen literacy imperative with a long history in developing programs for the education sector and general public in its previous incarnations as the State Film Centre & Cinemedia. Other programs have been created which also have a media access imperative so Digital Storytelling is part of a suite of programs that work well with each other.

Digital Diaries is another program that has been developed at the ACMI, which has worked very well as a program in its own right but also as a companion program to the Digital Storytelling program.

If you had to show someone what Digital Storytelling was, and could only recommend one Digital Storytelling project to check out, which one would that be?

This one is a hard one to answer - we use three major examples to show funding bodies etc to demonstrate the power of the program. Currently these are not online - we do intend to put a few of these examples online in time for our program launch later this year.

I realize you are in the middle of your Digital Storytelling program, but you have been conducting workshops since March. Would you be able to describe a typical workshop session? How long are they, what do you do?

Workshops run for approximately 3 days over 2 weekends - we have usually done a story briefing two weeks before. We show stories talk about writing for multimedia emphasizing the role of economy and pace etc. The briefing provides participants with the skills to prepare a script to first draft before the 3-day construction workshop. We also allow a 4th day without participants to allow for the final touches – credits, if needed & a full rendering and dubbing etc.

Over how many weeks (or how much time) do you feel a digital storytelling program requires? If you have completed any projects, perhaps you could tell us how long that took.

This depends on the client groups you work with - we need 3 full days with the storytellers & a briefing session which we ensure we space a week or 2 before the workshops - on an average we schedule the stages over 3 weeks. We also work with the key organizations that help us source the storytellers prior to the workshops - depending on the organization this can take a few weeks for them to determine who should be the key people to participate in the workshop.

Did you have connections or relationships with your community groups prior to starting Digital Storytelling? If not, how did you gain trust and build relationships with your groups?

We often do not have the relationships with the actual participants so the key organizations are crucial in bringing the participants to the workshops. We work with the key organizations and they identify the right storytellers to participate. In relation to trusting us this is done through the key organizations relationship with the participants primarily. We also work very hard in the context of the workshop to build on the existing trust the key organization has with participants.
In the case of the Alzheimer's association we are working with the Alzheimer´s counselor Bruce Perham he has an ongoing group workshop called Living with Memory loss- participants from this group are where we are drawing the participants of the Digital Storytelling workshop. Where possible these key people from the organizations also participate in the project to help ensure the trust is established quickly in the workshop.
The workshop with Indigenous Elders is a much longer process. In relation to gaining trust - we are working with a particular nursing home that has already documented stories through a 4-year oral history project - we will be working with the person who led this project as a way to build trust - this of course does not mean we will get the trust we understand this as one of the major challenges of this particular project so we will have built In a longer lead up time for this project than any other. The funding body also understands that this project may grind to a halt if we cannot gain the trust we also intend to train an Indigenous person to run the program in time to join the team in time to deliver this project.

What kinds of difficulties or barriers to working did you have with any of the participants?

Most people have managed this project very well under a range of circumstances - we have had to work hard with older participants to get them to play with the technology and with youth projects to date we have tended to use the Digital Diaries format it seems to work best although we have also used Digital Storytelling. We have had some issues with the people who are struggling with dementia we have often done more of the technology than we usually like to do - in these workshops we make sure that the participant focuses on the storyboard & we put the project together technically.

Though you are in the process of editing the content, would you be able to share an example story, or give us an idea of the kinds of outcomes from your projects so far?

Not sure how to best answer this - So far we are very pleased with the outcomes of the project - we have had feedback from Heart Foundation about how pleased they were with the project they believe that they have stories that really tell the human story behind the program which is important to the organization. The participants found it a healing process and a couple of them believe that it was a privilege to work on. We have shown the content as part of various Minister and VIP walkthroughs of ACMI and have had an amazing response from those that have seen the content. It has certainly caught the imagination of several health services Industries. For some Health organizations such as Alzheimer’s they identify the program as a potential service for families that do not want counseling but want a process of coming to terms with the loss of a family member to dementia.

Concerns are often raised about the 'intangible' aspects of digital work, and also the longevity of such work, i.e., that videotapes degrade in a few years and that formats become obsolete so quickly. Previously, you worked on PAML, (Performing Arts Multimedia Library) Pilot Project "to explore legal, technical and industry practice issues in the production and distribution of performing arts in the digital environment." With your experience in PAML, can you share some insight into what provisions you're planning for these project outcomes? Storage, display, publishing?

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image can be seen as an enormous digital repository - we encode the content & content manage we create at ACMI with a long-term view in mind- we are vigilant about metadata issues and we catalogue every story we Intend to keep to ensure that we have all the rights we need to store and exhibit content. As we are a collection management agency we are also very robust about licensing - We have been negotiating with APPRA & AMCOS about blanket licenses for production music for content we make that is part of programs such as Digital Storytelling.
For ACMI to exhibit content we must use production music we cannot afford the time or expense to gather clearances for commercial music. For those people who really want to create their stories with commercial music these are stories we do not keep or exhibit.
The Centre for Digital Storytelling focuses less on the music licensing as they are not a cultural institution that exhibits content to public. In order for us to exhibit content we must have clear guidelines about music. We have purchased and collected a large repository of stock Images and production music. We have also negotiated a blanket license that has taken us quite a few years to do!!!

Have you had any response from the participants of their reaction to your program so far?

Participants so far have had a very meaningful time with the project this has certainly been the feedback we have had from participants. We have noticed that it is very important for us to be able to set the expectation of production values for clients - we do only have 3 to 4 days to complete and there is a point where we cannot keep working on the project. It is definitely a low-end project and some participants have very high expectations of the technology, which we have to work through with them as part of the project.
We ensure in the release form that participants sign that we include a clause that allows the work to be pulled from the collection - When a participant no longer wants a work exhibited we return the master & destroy encoded copies - I expect that participants may well contact us at some time to have a story removed from the collection. Primarily we see this project as a process based program & the content produced is a bonus we work this through with the organisations we partner to understand that they may not have access to all the content produced or may have the use of content for only a period. This is all documented in our agreements.

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