• Short films saved for posterity – I an similar move the digital stories made in the BBC English Regions project “Telling Lives” were handed to the National Media Museum In Bradford. Over 350 stories were told by BBC listeners and viewers in workshops held between 2003 and 2005. Many of them are still accessible on the BBC Website
  I was exec producer of Telling Lives which ran in parallel with the BBC Capture Wales project. My teams were trained by the team in Wales with excellent results.

• Online video more popular than blogging and social networking – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – This is a very interesting and revealing piece of reporting. It demonstrates the opportunities presented to digital storytellers. There is an audience out there willing to watch video online in preference to watching broadcast TV. The challenge is now about promoting those stories to the potential audience.

• Vicar’s shed for ex-cons – Yorkshire Evening Post – This is one of the stories I recently recorded at a workshop for the Yorkshire and Humber Faiths Forum.
• What does social capital have to do with digital inclusion? : Connected Communities – A chance to participate in this event online. Storytelling is the heart of digital inclusion. The means to tell your story are secondary to knowing what you want your story to say.
• Video tools list for journalists – Jumpcut is closing down. Yahoo bought it about 18 months ago and now they’re pulling the plug as “part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!”. So I went on a search for other sites that offered slideshow and video editing services. None appear to be as versatile as Jumpcut, but there’s a list here if you want to plough through and give them a try. If you find one that suits the digital storytelling process come back here and comment. After a quick browse through the list Movie Masher appears to be best suited.
• 7 Minutes to Reinvent the Internet – The web has turned advertising principles on their head. The money is flowing in new directions and who knows where it will all end up. Seven people look into the not too distant future to suggest how advertising can be reinvented to fit the internet. Whilst these presentations are largely about making money, the lessons about how people use and experience the internet are valuable to all content creators.

• macosxhints.com – Create a mosaic of movie clips in QuickTime Player – This could be a useful hint. It's a script that opens multiple movies in Quicktime and plays them all at the same time.

• Overlap causes iMovie to crash – If you've experienced this problem here's a possible solution.

A really useful basic user guide presented in a series of video tutorials.

It produces a result like this:

Lower thirds captioning

You also have better control over the audio track, the title animation, and the sound effects–you can change them or move them around, for example. But we still would prefer a more precise manipulation. For example, we wanted to match up an exact part of a song to a specific point in a video clip. We could only do this after a lot of dragging and dropping and trial and error. If we had a timeline, lining them up would be a lot easier. For better transitions and edits, the precision editor works great, but we still miss the timeline.

While it seems that the new iMovie is better than the previous version the lack of a timeline still concerns me. I will update my views after I have installed iLife ‘09 for myself – still waiting for the postman to delever.

While you’re on the site look through some of the stories told in their annual Coming to California competition. I find the more I watch, the better my stories become.