Our first class

Update

We've been holding our first class. Participants include staff from our organizations and some brave volunteers from other organizations. We have 10 people participating. 8 are people with disabilities.

Schedule

We scheduled 4 classes April - May. The first and the 4th for 4 hours, the others for 2. Here's the schedule we started the class with:

Before Class:

• Prepare draft script.

We sent out a long instruction email and asked people to read the Digital Story Cookbook (at least the 7 elements) before class. For other groups, we may need to add an hour or two session for this introduction prior to people being able to draft a script.

We also met individually with everyone to load the free software on their machines. This gave us a chance to talk about the project, answer questions and check in on how their draft scripts were progressing.

Day One (4 hours)

• Review the 7 elements of digital storytelling
  
• Story Circle
  
• Work on Scripts

Before Day Two:

• Finish script!
  
• Make appointments for Audio Script with Kathryn or Glenn

Day Two: 2 Hours (April 21 12:30 – 2:30)

• Overview on using and finding photos and music
  
• Photo Editing Tutorial using Picasa
  
• Work on editing photos
  
• Work on finding music

Before Day Three:

• Finalize music selections
• Finalize images

Day Three: 2.5 Hours (April 24 10 – 2:00)

• Work on Photo Story Videos
  

Before Day Four

• Prepare script for captioning.

Day Four: 4 Hours (May 14 12:30 – 4:30)

• Captioning Tutorial Overstream.com
• Next Steps
  

Location and equipment

We found a free location at the Michigan Commission on Disability Concerns offices. The room was great with outlets in the middle of the floor and tables we could rearrange easily. They had wireless internet available too! The room didn't have window so it did get stuffy. We had to close the door as office cubicles were located just outside.

We brought our laptops and a projector. On day two, we each brought a scanner. In hindsight, we think we need to have people who want to scan photos come early, as this took a lot of our time and others in the class also needed some help and encouragement. We also had a digital camera available, though no one needed this.

One person borrowed a laptop from UCP Michigan. Everyone else had laptops they could use. Everyone had wireless. We did have one computer station with Internet available, but no one needed to use it.

Use of Free Software

We decided to use the following free software: Photo Story 3, Picasa, and Audacity. For captions, we didn't know at the start what we'd be using. See below for more information.

Narration and Individual Help

We are doing the narration/voice recording individually. Some people are recording their voice directly into photo story, others are using audacity. If they used audacity, they had to mix their music, sounds and voice into one file to import into photo story. Since this is a bit more complicated, mostly the people who are more technically confident are using this method. I found a video tutorial on how to do this and gave people a copy.

We need more microphones though. People wanted to be able to edit after the individual sessions. I found some at home we'd gotten over the years to use with a voice input program. They had headphones and a microphone attached and were optimized for voice recording. I've given all of these out to class members now. I'd like to be able to buy some for the organization to have for this project.

As we've met with people individually for the voice recordings, we've been providing help on other aspects of their stories too. The time in class is shorter than the 3 days we had with the Center for Digital Storytelling so there isn't much time in group for individual assistance.

Captions

We've now decided to use overstream.net and Google Video. Google video has a button to toggle for captions. But you have to upload a caption file. In overstream, the recently added a feature that allows you to export your caption file. So people can take this extra step or just point people to oversteam.net to view the captions.

The advantage of saving the caption file to your computer is being able to show the video with captions from your computer instead of having to connect to the web. I still have to learn how to do this, but know it's possible. For now, people may just have to access the web to show their videos with captions.

We may explore the Magpie/subtitle workshop route in the future.

Modifications to the schedule.

We realized late into this process that the last day's schedule was way too much and we probably need to schedule another day. I'll post soon how this went. I've polled the class and many want more time. Glenn and I are both so busy with our other work, as are the people in class, so scheduling will be difficult. We hope to view near done or finished prior to captions video stories in tomorrows class.

I have some work to do to get ready!

Till next time,

Downloading Mediasite Streams

I had to download a Mediasite stream, and got an application called WM Recorder that downloads the file from the stream, not from the desktop. It produces a very high quality video, though it takes a while (since the stream is intermittent because of the way buffering works).

The file is a .dat file that I converted to avi-obviously could have converted to other formats.

Captioning videos with overstream.

I found it fairly easy to add captions to my video using Overstream.com, although it was a bit tedious trying to get the captions to start and end when I wanted them to. I was able to cut and paste the text from a document.

You can see a couple sample videos with captions at http://seventygra.googlepages.com

Making Video Accessible

Not only do we want to tell compelling stories, we want the stories to be accessible. To start, we've been looking at two things: captioning for people who are Deaf or hard of hearing (or have the volume turned down, don't have speakers and so on) and audio description for people who are Blind.

We want to make this easy for people to do with free or cheap software, but haven't found a great way to do either as yet.

You Tube isn't accessible for either, unless you add captions as subtitles and they become part of the video. Google Video has a closed caption feature. I found a service called Overstream.net and used this to add captions to my first digital story.

It took me a while to figure out how to both create captions then add them to Google. Here's what I did:

• I downloaded the free Magpie and used this to add captions.
  
• Then I saved the captions as plain text.
  
• I opened the plain text file and deleted everything that wasn't caption text or start and stop times.
  
• I downloaded the free subtitle workshop and imported the captions text file.
  
• Then I saved it in "subrip" format.
  
• I uploaded the video to Google Video.
  
• Then I used their web features to upload the subrip caption file. Instructions for adding captions to Google video .

None of this was easy, though it was cheap (free software).

Apparently, if you download even more software, you can use the subtitle workshop to burn the captions as part of the video, instead of a separate file. I haven't tried this but Jared has and he described how it worked.

I also uploaded a video using Overstream.net. My first digital story is there with captions. A learning curve here too. I heard about this on a blog by Proud Geek, who gives great instructions based on his own efforts to do captions. I just now found he has a post on how to use Overstream to add captions to Google Video! (Post on Sept 17, 2007).

No one seems to have an audio description feature. Of course you could try to add audio when making the video but we are using free/low cost software so this isn't possible, or at least we haven't figured out how to do it as yet. I want to try to do this using Magpie though.

So much to learn!

Welcome!

The first part of the Many Faces One Voice project is to educate ourselves about storytelling and the the use of technology for storytelling.

We attended a 3 day workshop in January 2008 to learn to put together digital stories. In February 2008, we'll attend a 5 day "Train the Trainer". Both the workshop and the train the trainer are from the Center for Digital Storytelling.

We'll use this information and research into affordable and accessible tools to develop a curriculum. We plan to present this to a pilot group of Michigan Disability Rights Coalition and UCP Michigan staff members in April and May 2008.

The next step is to teach people with disabilities how to tell their stories in a compelling and accessible manner using the web. We'll focus on those who are working with advocacy groups on issues of importance to Michigan's Disability Community.

We've explored some tools for captioning to make videos accessible to people who are Deaf and hard of hearing. We need to learn about descriptive video for people who are blind or low vision. This blog has been created to share our journey.