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| Behind the scenes: Lights, action, cameras and lots of professional tips helped students and teachers learn narrative technique at Digital Storytelling seminar |
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It seemed for a moment that Carl Kurlander was just mocking one of the enormous egos that populate Hollywood when he told students at The Consortium for Public Education’s Digital Storytelling seminar a tale about his first job as an intern at Universal Studios. Among other tasks, it was Kurlander’s job to get lunch for a producer who sent his meal—and Kurlander—packing because a hamburger ordered with onions on the side instead arrived with onions on top. But the producer’s peevishness wasn’t merely about egos, Kurlander recalled — it was an object lesson about details: “If you can’t get the little things right, nobody is ever going to give you $100 million to make a movie.”
Kurlander, who became a screenwriter, with hits like St. Elmo’s Fire and dozens of television comedies, was one of five professionals offering workshops at the seminar and giving the students pointers about narrative, sound, visual effects and new technologies. Others included: Martha Rial, a Pulitzer-prize winning photographer; Eric Graf, a musician, self-taught sound technician and founder of Blackberry Studios; Tony Báez Milán, a screenwriter and director whose credits include Chrysalis, a film adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story; and Clara Phillips, who works on the Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab’s Gigapan photography projects.
The workshops took place at Monessen-based Douglas Education Center (DEC), a career school with a program in digital filmmaking and co-host of The Consortium’s Digital Storytelling seminars.
Through the workshops and the recent annual Student Leadership Conference hosted by The Consortium’s career education program, The Future is Mine, “I met so many new people, not only students, but also adults who have truly helped me further educate myself in the career field I love,” said Montana, a junior at Waynesburg Central High School, who aspires to be a journalist.
Montana said the workshops taught her that communications skills are “crucial” not only in telling stories, but discovering them.
A student volunteer sketches out a scene to be recreated on stage
The workshops are designed not just for aspiring film students, but for anyone interested in professional techniques of scripting and presentation that help convey ideas and engage audiences, said The Consortium’s Associate Executive Director, Steve Seliy, who organizes the Digital Storytelling seminars as “blended professional development” opportunities, where students and their teachers learn side-by-side.
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“By having experts in their fields demonstrate these concepts, using technologies that are now widely available, we’re able to help students think about the best ways to present their own work, whether in their classrooms or in their own future careers.”
Rial held the students in thrall with tales of the relationships she cultivated with refugees, drivers, translators and others on her way to shooting pictures during the Rwandan civil war in the early 1990s. Without their individual stories and their help, Rial said she wouldn’t have found the images that captured their struggle and won her the Pulitzer.
Director Tony Báez Milán and a student film crew at Douglas Education Center share techniques for staging scenes
Báez Milán, a DEC staffer, demonstrated the importance of split-second communication among a production crew as he darted around a stage giving directions to camera and light technicians. Staged miscues resulted in staged mix-ups while clear, tightly timed directives provided just the right direction and just the right results. Telling a story, whether on stage or on a page is about vision, Milan Baez said, summoning volunteers to help him create different illusions in front of the cameras. But no vision can be fulfilled “without preparation, choices and communication,” he said. Choices need to be made because “nobody is going to watch a 10-hour movie,” Báez Milán noted. Nor can the choices be made without an understanding of narrative sequence. “Each camera view, each shot influences the audience’s impression and understanding of the next.”
Graf showed students how voice, inflection and music contribute to storytelling. But the former high school English teacher also emphasized the centrality of narrative structure and technique. “In almost anything you do, I don’t think there’s any skill more important than writing and the use of language,” he said.
Friendship was the theme for stories students put “in the bag.”
Attendees got to try their hands with various aspects of storytelling. Gigapan, a robotic camera technology that CMU developed in conjunction with NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), proved a favorite. The technology, first used on Mars, makes it possible to photograph panoramic scenes in discrete segments that can be viewed either as a seamless whole, or in minute details caught by the zoom lens before being merged. Students in Phillips’ Gigapan workshop created stories on paper bags, then wore or held them to become part of a bigger photo narrative.
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