I Love Books!

This is my final entry for my Digital Storytelling course. I wrote a short essay on what it is about books that I love. I first tried using ImageLoop, a slideshow tool, to try something slightly different. I just wanted to create a slideshow with captions, but it doesn't have that capacity. Therefore, I decided to use Voicethread again to see if I would do better with the phone recording this time. http://voicethread.com/share/1993138/  

Here is the short essay:
I love books! I love the smell of them when they are new and smell of ink. I love their smell when they are old and smell of libraries. I love the feel of their smooth pages. And I love the feel of their rough spines. I love their ability to transport readers to other places and times. I love their capacity to let us live many lives at once. Most of all, I love their redemptive power to free us from prisons that are often not physical.

I like that I didn't include the captions along with the phone voice recording this time around. I think it's because I wasn't in a panic about losing my creation! I think Voicethread is a great storytelling tool. If someone as technologically challenged as I can use it, so can you!

If I Were 10 Years Old Again

This new Digital Story was created using Voicethread:
http://voicethread.com/share/1989878/

If I were ten years old again, the first thing I would do is get my Hula hoop with the sparkly balls inside and join Lily across the street to see the colors fly!

Then, I would run one of the many races around our combined backyards, listening to that crinkly sound of the Australian pine needles beneath my skinny, long legs, and feeling the wind whipping up my ponytail like a mad windsock.

Next, I would climb the Gumbo Limbo tree near the park, even though Dad would have to get me down later, because it was the very best Pirate’s view.   

I’d draw my masterpieces in bright chalk on the sidewalk as the sun was starting to set.

And finally, I would lie on the wooden dock and feel the sun on the wide planks and stare out at every ripple on the bay and I’d point out all the animal shapes in the clouds without worrying that I should be doing something useful with my time.

And I’d do that until Mom finally called me in, signaling the end of a perfect day.

When I initially considered what I would write for this project, I thought of wanting something magical such as having the ability to fly. Then I fantasized about doing something creative and liberating such as being a ballerina and leaping and twirling with seemingly effortless grace.  Even though they were both refreshingly liberating daydreams, I realized that what I most wanted was to be a kid again back in South Beach before it became South Beach.  It made me so happy to remember all the things that I used to do and would love to do again. No one would question a kid with her legs up in the air staring at the clouds, but they would certainly think a grown woman addled for doing the same. It was very revealing, almost therapeutic!

Although I did this project as one of my assignments I kept envisioning my brothers as the audience and their enjoyment when recalling our adventures. I wanted to evoke unmitigated freedom and its resulting joy.

Uploading the images was very easy, as was writing in the captions, but the voice-over with the phone threw me off completely because the recording kept saying it couldn’t hear me. I ended up including captions along with the recording, which makes it slow-going.

With Voicethread I learned a method of showing a slide presentation while reading the story, which is great for Digital Storytelling. I do want to get a mic for my computer though, and do another one to share with my family and friends.

House Whispers

This Digital Storytelling project was done using Twitter. Here is the URL to see it on Twitter: http://twitter.com/LeonoraAP.
We had to write 3 Tweets about a story we were considering with each Tweet only allowing for 140 characters  (including spaces). After much struggle I was able to condense my story's opening sentences to the following:

She could hardly believe she had acquired the beautiful old place so easily, almost as if it was meant to be.  Faint whispers startled her…

They were coming from the back room and as she approached there was a rush of footsteps and the rustling of heavy drapes. “Who is in there?”

Turning the knob she encountered a bare room. Where were the noises coming from? Abruptly, her phone’s ringtone broke the sudden silence.

“Hello”, the prior owner’s voice shook slightly, “I wanted you to have the house, but there are some things about it that you should know…"

In doing this project I learned to be more succinct with my writing, something I don't often accomplish. It was interesting seeing what all the hoopla was about with Twitter.  Much of a story depends on the words that are chosen and the interplay of language, so as a medium for storytelling I found it to be frustratingly limiting, except for Haiku perhaps. I think it is a viable tool for business as I discovered much to my chagrin from all the updates I received on various institutions I chose to "follow".

Old Newspapers

Box of newspapers from WWII

I was given a box of newspapers dating from WWII, which I tried donating to a local museum for preservation purposes. However, they told  me that newsprint was never conserved because the low quality of the paper made it unsuitable. I have held on to them ever since, unable to bear discarding part of history, especially someone's history, someone who held on to it for so long. We have been asked to write a story on some artifacts we treasure for my Digital Storytelling course and I did the project using One True Media, which can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLaPmPrFFmI&feature=channel_video_title

<iframe width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/OLaPmPrFFmI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Here is the story I imagined for my box of newspapers.

The cottage sits serenely on a short, quiet street that is part of a small historical section of South Miami inhabited by other cottages and bordered by a winding canal. Its owner had passed away and her children settled the estate quickly, selling off the property and taking everything with them. Everything that is, but a box of frail, yellow newspapers neatly tucked into a box in the attic of the old house.

The newspapers, which the previous owner of the cottage had lovingly kept all these years form a chronicle with the front page of “The Miami Herald” or the now defunct “Miami News” of the milestones of WW II.

December 8, 1941, Japan Wars on US: Planes Bomb

January 2, 1943, War Time Orange Bowl features Miami’s beloved Orange Bowl Stadium, unceremoniously torn down in 2008, paying homage to our soldiers. An article tucked neatly away inside declares, Miamians Toe Behavior Line on New Year’s Eve – it was always a raucous place.

December 6, 1943, the famous picture of FDR, Churchill and Stalin at the Tehran Conference.

 July 26, 1943, Mussolini Ousted and the reporter speculated where Mussolini would go into hiding and if the Germans would indeed try and rescue him.

December 6, 1944, Invasion Launched with D-Day photos amazingly similar to scenes from Saving Private Ryan

April 15, 1945, Death of President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt

I could see her poring over every inch of information she could gleam from the reports of a world that had surely gone mad. Not knowing the outcome of the war she saved the papers to analyze them in the aftermath. It wouldn’t do to think too much about it while it was happening;  just go to work on the war effort as women were doing for the first time in droves, stay informed and keep going. That way the fear that her husband wouldn’t return and that everything that was good and decent in the world might be wiped out by a madman couldn’t paralyze her.

May 8^th, 1945, VE Decree Due Today reads the final headline. It was the formal surrender of the Nazis and the end of her long ordeal. Her husband did return and the world righted itself as the ordinary pursuits of everyday life took their rightful preeminence. There was not a single paper that she held on to so tenaciously after that date.

The museum won’t take her newspapers because newsprint can’t be stabilized and wasn’t meant to last anyhow. I try not to handle them too much and to keep them as dry as possible in a humid climate such as ours. Even though the papers crumble a little more each day,  I hold on to them, lest all they represented to her be disregarded and thrown out.

One True Media was  easy to use, mixing my images with the recording of my voice telling the story, with a short video clip and then posting it to YouTube. The only challenging aspect was that I used my Apple I-phone to do all of the above and my PC uses another format so I solved it by borrowing a friend's  Apple laptop and submitting it to One True Media from there.

The Speed of Light

This project required making an Animated Video Short with Animoto. The URL is:
http://animoto.com/play/UFu1KKgw0ot04SbDb9aEnw

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The story behind this short video is that my daughter had come home for Spring Break and as we caught up with what was going on in her life, she made a gesture that took me back to when she was a baby.The time from when she was 6 months old and gesticulated as she had just done now at 23 moved at the speed of light for me. So much of life is like that, as if you just blinked and then you are somewhere else far removed and that was my inspiration for my story. I didn't want to tell a story of nostalgia since that has melancholic connotations and I was very happy having lunch and girl talk with my adult daughter. I wanted to evoke the urgency of life and say that you have to grab on tight, hence the song I chose to go with the video.

Even though this was part of a class project for my Digital Storytelling course and my classmates were my intended audience, I can't wait to show my family what I did and what it means to me. Because Animoto guides you through the project and gives you a limited range of clips or photos and music to chose from, I do not feel I had much creative input other than my intent in making the video. I didn't know what to expect in making the clip through Animoto, especially since all of this technology is so new to me. However, I felt the project was greatly assisted by their step-by-step guidance.

The slight hindrance I found with Animoto is that I wish there were more clips available for each genre. Most challenging to me was trying to make the clips fill the allotted time, so I got a little confused setting the duplicates to play from the beginning and some were cut off earlier than I would have liked. On the other hand, the great highlight of the project was picking the music and then seeing how it all came together.

I learned to put images and music together, which is quite an experience for me. I know this is old hat for a lot of people but the great thing about being so green is being filled with such an amazing sense of wonder!

South Florida's Coral Reefs in Wordle

This code is the link to my latest project for digital Storytelling and it was done through Wordle, which can be linked using this code:
          <a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3145791/Leonor_Alvarez-Perez"
          title="Wordle: Leonor Alvarez-Perez"><img
          src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/3145791/Leonor_Alvarez-Perez"
          alt="Wordle: Leonor Alvarez-Perez"
          style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"></a>

The story I wanted to tell through Wordle is about the coral reefs off the coast of South Florida, which are beautiful, unique, and alive. I love to snorkel and get lost in the silence of an entire world onto its own that exists so close to the surface of the water.

Many people are unaware that the reefs are alive, that they are animals with tiny plants inside them, and that they are unique in the United States and singular world-wide in that they lie in shallow waters. Hence, my inspiration in telling this story is to make people realize their singularity and fragility. I wish to awaken in visitors to our reefs a sense of awe and by extension of protection.

I created this story keeping in mind the beautiful colors of the corals as they undulate in the water and the terrible damage people inflict on them as they attempt to reach out and touch them. Sometimes swimmers try to balance on them with their fins or boaters clunk down anchors between them and chunk pieces off. A common belief seems to be that the coral can repair itself, but the reality is that once it is damaged it remains ailing and often dies. Awareness is one of the foremost factors in the enlistment of cooperation.

The challenge of using Wordle is that the project can be easily lost when you are trying to see how the arrangement looks. However, the highlight is how the essential words of the piece are enlarged and rearranged so that it pops out at you in one piece and tells a story instantly without actually having to read the entire article. Personally, I love to read but sometimes you just want the gist of it and this is the advantage of using Wordle to tell a story.

Another One Bites the Dust

I am taking a Digital Storytelling course and creating this blog is one of my class projects. I have never had a blog before so I will be exploring a whole new world. My first story is about something close to my heart, historical/architectural preservation, which I will post here with an image.

 Art Deco was characterized by skyscrapers in the United States but in Miami, particularly Miami Beach, it was low scaled. Some of the Art Deco buildings, especially the hotels along Ocean Drive used the finials and spires of skyscrapers, but on buildings that never exceeded eight stories.

Art Deco style in Miami Beach reflected the ocean liners that were the essence of luxury and travel and were intrinsically tied to our tourist economy by the use of wide, long porches with metal rails and porthole windows. The bas reliefs, friezes, iron ornamentation on screened doors, and etched glass windows reflected the South Florida vernacular. This vernacular of untamed mangrove foliage, alligators, and rare birds of the Everglades must have seemed exotic to the rest of the nation, since Florida is the only state that is sub-tropical, but it spoke to what defined the state.

During the Depression the commission of public buildings was relegated to the W.P.A. throughout most of the U.S. However, Miami Beach saw a flurry of activity with the investment of private funds for the creation of small hotels that catered to the middle class, a virtually unheard of occurrence during the Great Depression.  Streamline Moderne emerged during this time by capitalizing on the aerodynamic designs of Art Deco but simplified, streamlined, and softened by the rounding of corners.

Appreciation for the Art Deco architecture in Miami Beach did not really come about until 1979 with the creation by Barbara Capitman of the Miami Design Preservation League.  Notwithstanding,  it has been an uphill battle to save buildings from the wrecking ball. Two of  the most important examples of  Art Deco and Streamline  in Miami Beach were the The Senator hotel and the New Yorker hotel, both imploded in the name of progress. The Senator was the quintessential example of Art Deco architecture. Built in 1939 by L. Murray Dixon with porthole windows, smooth keystone (as the local oolitic limestone is know) tinted in the lightest shade of pink before it fades into white, etched glass, terrazzo floors (once ubiquitous in South Florida and now almost nonexistent), a bas relief  pelican fountain, straight-line ledges jutting slightly over the windows to provide shade, and a perfume bottle spire in the center. It suffered the ultimate indignity in 1988 when it was demolished to make a parking lot. The New Yorker was built in 1939 as well by one of the foremost architects in Miami, Henry Hohauser. Rising eight stories high on Collins Avenue with perfectly rounded off corners that made it appear to be hugging itself, its back towards the ocean, with a central parapet that reached up towards the skies it defined the elegance and yet solidity of Streamline architecture. Carefully cloaked under the rights of property ownership it was demolished in 1981.

When these structures are sacrificed to the wrecking ball not only do we lose a part of history and an artistic form that is irreplaceable, but we lose yet another of the bonds that create a sense of place for a city that as a tourist destination has often been transient like the dirigibles that had to be tied down with multiple steel cables off the McArthur Causeway, lest they drift away.

Creating this blog was not difficult, it was the images I struggled with. This image of an old postcard sat on the top of the blog forever, until recently when I was able to move it to its appropriate spot. I think it mostly has to do with losing your fear of doing something wrong and then losing the image completely.