So I recently got a job... and you can imagine my excitement, way to kick off the new year I thought to myself. On my first day, I'm told I have to take an online Digital Storytelling course so I'm well groomed for the job, to be honest, this was music to my ears, I mean how hard can it be? An online course, I live for this kind of stuff... but boy was I was wrong. In my opinion the Ds106 site isn't very user friendly, I find that instructions seem to be a little all over the place and that makes it kind of hard to know whether you're progressing or no. And so I PANICKED!!! I was about ready to grab my little bag and say thanks for the job offer boss and for the vote of confidence but I think this course is best left for the geniuses. Fortunately for me I didn't grab my bag, instead I watched the Neil Gaiman that's at the beginning of unit 1 and it really helped, some of his words actually echoed and got me thinking Adidas's tagline "Impossible is nothing" and I managed to picked myself up from there.
Yesterday I took part in my first daily create task on Ds106 and it was extremely insightful. Daily create for those that aren't familiar is almost like a daily challenge found on the Ds106 daily create sight. The challenge for the day could be to create a a video clip or write a short story based on a picture or edit something fun and create into your toast like I discovered from past archives. So my first daily create task was to do some research on Spaghetti Westerns which until yesterday I didn't know was a term that existed to refer to Western movies with more of a Spanish influence and after doing some research post a video to the Ds106 daily create tweeter account. So after doing a little research I found a 1966 of the movie Django (which I didn't even know existed) and I was only familiar with 2012 Django Unchained version of the movie, which is way different from the original. Unfortunately I have not been able to find an English version of the original movie on YouTube, I would have been nice to see the contrast between. On the plus side though, having watched at least one version of the movie helps one get a bit more creative as it allowed me to play around with the lines from the movie I knew and sort of apply them to the older version. Those who've seen Django Unchained which is the 2012 version of the movie will immediately pick up on the fact that I titled my daily create video with a line from the more recent version of the movie, I guess you could sort of call it a marriage between the old and the new.
My video clip isn't out of this world amazing but I enjoyed making it. I had never used giphy.com before but it's so easy to use, even an amateur like me got it right. I feel I'm slowly getting a hang of the course, and hopefully I'll be a digital storytelling pro by the end of it all.
Cheers!
