Digital stories are 'mini movies', created by ordinary people and broadcast online. Two minutes or so in length, featuring a dozen or so images and around 250 words, these short-form personal narratives are multimedia sonnets from the people.

This evening seminar at BAFTA will showcase the work of digital storytellers, and explore the phenomenon with some of the leading figures behind the digital storytelling movement in Britain.

Inspired by the pioneering work of Dana Atchley and Joe Lambert at the Centre for Digital Storytelling in California, photographer and lecturer Daniel Meadows was instrumental in setting up Capture Wales � the BBC�s first Digital Storytelling project. Over the last three years, Capture Wales has helped to produce 200 digital stories, and showcase them on the Capture Wales website. A selection of the stories also featured on Wales Today, BBC2W, BBC Radio Wales and Radio Cymru.

Daniel characterises these personal, multimedia tales told from the heart as 'scrapbook television'. They are rich on feeling, and an intensely democratic form of storytelling � anyone with a small amount of training can make and distribute them.

Each month the Capture Wales team takes its portable lab to village halls, pubs, libraries, schools, and helps a group of people to make their own digital stories. Participants write their own scripts, create their own images, record their own voices, and edit their stories on computers. The team�s remit is to reach parts of the community not normally reached by television, and to represent as broad a cross-section of people as possible.

In 2002, the Capture Wales team helped to set up the Telling Lives Digital Storytelling project in the north of England with teams in Hull, at BBC Radio Humberside, and Blackburn, at BBC Radio Lancashire. These projects, together with similar activities in colleges and community organisations around the UK, are part of a growing international digital storytelling movement across the USA, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Sweden and Japan.

Digital Storytelling is the most recent manifestation in a long UK television tradition of "access broadcasting", which included the work of the community programming unit at LWT in the 1970s, the Video Diaries series at the BBC in the 1980s, and the subsequent Video Nation project in the 1990s, which now has a permanent home on BBC online.

Speakers include:

Daniel Meadows - Creative Director, BBC Capture Wales
Daniel was a prime mover in the new documentary photography movement in Britain. His project Living Like This: Photographs from the Free Photographic Omnibus (1973-5) was an important record of British (primarily working class) life. As well as The Bus (The Harvill Press, 2001) his books include Living Like This (Arrow, 1975), Nattering-in-Paradise (Simon & Schuster, 1988), Set Pieces-Being About Film Stills Mostly (BFI publications, 1993), and National Portraits (Viewpoint/Montage, 1997) a collection edited by Val Williams of the street portraits made from the Free Photographic Omnibus.
Daniel became the leader of the documentary photography course at Newport and teaches photography and new media in the Centre for Journalism Studies at Cardiff University.

Rupert Creed � Producer, BBC Telling Lives
Rupert worked for over 20 years as a writer and theatre director. He was co-founder and artistic director of Remould Theatre Company specialising in large cast community plays and 'oral history' documentary dramas that toured nationally and internationally. The company developed many plays about working lives based on transcripts of interviews and stories from individual workers which were edited into a dramatic form. Rupert currently leads the digital storytelling team based at BBC Radio Humber.

Gilly Adams - Director of BBC Wales' Writers Unit, Drama Producer for Radio Wales
Gilly is a workshop leader and director who specialises in work with text. For more than a decade she was the Artistic Director of the Made in Wales Stage Company, which developed and produced new plays. In addition, Gilly works regularly with an international network for women in contemporary theatre, the Magdalena Project. She is also a long-term Artistic Associate of Welfare State International, the celebratory arts company, where she works on rites of passage and ceremonial. Gilly facilitates the story circle for Capture Wales.

Chris Mohr � Consultant and Trainer
Chris Mohr is a former BBC TV and radio producer/presenter. She co-produced BBC2's award-winning Video Nation strand from 1993-2000 and subsequently developed the project as a community website, bringing user-generated video stories to the BBC's local sites (www.bbc.co.uk/videonation).

Jessica Fenn - digital storyteller
Jessica was born in the East End of London and has lived there all here life except for four years when she lived and worked in Paris and Cape Town. She is 28 and now works as a temp in West London. The theme of the workshop Jessica attended in London was romantic love. After long deliberation about how on earth she could make a film about love without completely embarrassing herself, she decided she would choose the most romantic thing that ever happened to her as a subject: the 21st birthday party in 1996 organised by her boyfriend at the time in Cape Town. She was so happy with the resulting piece and feels she now has something to keep forever about that very special time in her life, as well as the memories of an amazing and revealing week making a digital story.

Chair: Stephen Jeffery-Poulter � Convergence Programme Consultant, NMK

Links

Capture Wales www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales
Telling Lives BBC Humber:www.bbc.co.uk/humber/telling_lives
Digital Nation www.bbc.co.uk/videonation
Center for Digital Storytelling www.storycenter.org

Digital Storytelling is the 10th event in the Creative Alchemy series produced by Stephen Jeffery-Poulter.