Hello again! This week is making me miss bootcamp.  That’s right.  I said it.  We had so much to do this week, and I feel like there wasn’t enough time to do it!  I really love that we can choose what assignment to do first however, because it gave me a sense of freedom.  My mood really dictated which assignment I wanted to accomplish right then and there.

I began this week by talking about storytelling and my ideas on what I believe that is.  I learned that others in this class imagine the same thing when they think about storytelling: people waving their hands around, making gestures, and verbally telling others what they know.  I came to realize that blogging is a form of storytelling and falls under digital storytelling.  So in essence, I’m storytelling every time I blog!

I found Kurt Vonnegut‘s video, The Shape of Stories, so interesting!  I never thought about giving plot lines a shape.  I decided to analyze the film Enchanted.  Unlike a lot of princess stories, the main character starts out almost completely happy, so the shape of the story wasn’t the typical Cinderella curve.  My story line of Enchanted blog also includes an example of digital storytelling I remembered from years ago: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.  It still makes me laugh so hard!

in{SPIRE} is a site that is a collection of the best work of ds106.  I chose a mosaic that was created using dozens of photographs to portray the artist.  I also chose a mashup movie trailer from Storify, which holds the most recent best works of ds106 from this past Fall 2012.  I really look forward to doing a movie mashup of my own this semester! These great pieces of work, found here, were completed by former students of digital storytelling, so I hope I can accomplish something similar by the end of this class.

This week, I completed three daily creates.  They’re still my favourite to do, because it’s like opening a present every morning!  The first, “Make a blue screen of death message using type only“, was funny because I get that message on my computer all the time.  It hasn’t crashed yet, so I’m still holding out!  When making the image, I just kept thinking about what runs through my head when that image shows up.  This is what I came up with:

The next daily create, “Take a photo that represents math at work in the world“, was really easy for me, because I had actually just finished taking photos in the library with a friend.  I decided to use one of those photos to represent the numerical system that books are categorized by:

Finally, the last daily create I did was to “Make a picture of something broken. Literally or figuratively.” This was the day of my team’s first rugby game of the season (Won vs. St. Mary’s 29-17), and our photographer emailed me his photos from the day.  I used two of his photos to create a sequence of events picture.  Unfortunately, the girl getting “broken” was on our team, but she was fine!

In addition to the daily creates and all the other activities this week, I created a story using 5 photos and no text.  It’s called BFF Helps Escapee.  Although the plot changed due to some extra cast members…I’m glad it did because it kept my imagination going and helped spur my creativity.  It wasn’t hard to get the kitten interested in Gus Gus (trust me) but I did have to retake a lot of shots because Gus moved so fast, they would be blurry!  I had a lot of fun with this assignment though.

We were put into comment groups this week so that it would be easier for us to connect with each other on a smaller scale.  My group has four other people in it: Dylan Gott, Fairuz Maggio, Casey Ragghianti, and Alice Watkins.  At first, it was hard to find everyone’s blogs.  I had to search through them all and read the “About” section to make sure I was looking at the right people, but once I found them, I bookmarked them to make sure I wouldn’t lose their blogs!  Casey and I talked through twitter a bit to get to know each other some more.  I’m still forgetting to use twitter to publicize my blog, because I used twitter before this class, and it was never for school stuff.  I only pushed 2 or 3 blog links this week via twitter.

#ds106 The Shape of Stories: ds106.larahampson.com/the-shape-of-s…

— Lara Hampson (@l_hampson23) February 3, 2013

I really like the setup of Casey’s  blog.  The owl idea is very cute and it’s nice how she incorporates her owl theme into the titles of her blog posts.  When I read Dylan’s blog on the shape of stories, I liked that he put captions on his story lines to follow along.  I hadn’t thought about that, but next time I’ll keep that in mind!  I found myself nodding along to Fairuz’s blog on her definition of storytelling.  We definitely share the ideas of verbal storytellers.  I have a lot of respect for Alice’s artwork and I’m glad she includes a lot of her work into her blog.  It’s nice to have more insight into someone whom we may never meet.

Casey commented on my Storytelling post and gave me some more ideas to consider, like if I believe that music or art is a type of storytelling.  Dylan categorized storytelling into digital, spoken, and written, which I found to be a great way to organize things.  I do believe that some ideas will fall outside these categories though.

The one thing I’d like to improve when blogging is the uncomfortable transitions I have when I need to link back to my old posts from the week.  I feel like it’s awkward to just say..”And that post is found here.” With “here” hyperlinked to the post.  I’ve found some ways to get over this, but I still wonder if there’s more I can do.