Looking at digital stories

The digital story that I have picked is Tanya by Monte Hallis http://www.storycenter.org/stories/index.php?cat=2

The author grabbed my attention with her opening line that she never had a lot of friends. As she said this, the viewer sees a picture of an empty swing. The swing reminds me of childhood, a time when friends are made easily, and friendships are innocently genuine and unpretentious. An empty swing is hence a simple and yet powerful picture that symbolises the lack of true friends, which unfortunately seems to become a fact of life as one grows older. This clever combination of verbal words and image, which I have come to know as synaesthesia, had me hooked on the story immediately. There were several instances of this clever combination throughout the story. To name another one - the following picture of a central frame that is surrounded by many smaller repeated pictures as she spoke about being shy and confusing friendship with popularity. How apt!

However, I did not finish watching it the first time round even though it was only one-and-a-half minutes long. I think I lost interest because I had to put some effort to listen to the voice over in order to follow the story. The storytelling relied rather greatly on the voice over, which were difficult to hear at times with the loud background music. So I gave up midway through the story.

I went on to look at other stories but somehow, I decided to give Tanya another chance. I looked at it again. This time, I made an effort to try to make out what Monte Hallis said from beginning to the end.

Now, besides the first part that was well executed as shared earlier, Monte Hallis made clever use of silence in her storytelling. The silence is almost like the silence of her disbelief that Tanya knows her middle name. To me, it is also a revelation of the true friendship that they had.

While I did find the music a little too loud, I found that the timing for the line, “Ooh I hate to see her go” when she stopped speaking. That tells me that Tanya had passed away when Monte Hallis put this story together.

I did a search and found that Los Angeles Times carried the story about Tanya Shaw who first tried to find adoption for her two daughters. When that failed, she decided to set up Tanya’s Children, an agency top help single mothers with AIDS find adoptive parents. So I think Monte Hallis could possibly have created this story to recover emotionally from the loss of her friend, to remember the true friend she had, and to help her friend to continue her work in setting up Tanya’s Children.

I could not understand the meaning behind the drawing that ended the story and the one shown when she spoke about Tanya’s dream. Perhaps she could have added a subtitle or text over the drawing so clueless people like me could have some leads to draw conclusions from. Contrasting this with “Lyfe-N-Rhyme,” I see how useful the subtitles are and how they can serve as “visual boundary signals” that “marks the plot.”

With regards to larger semiotic patterns, I think the author used images to anchor every main point that she wants to put across. This is consistent throughout the story except the part when the author spoke about Tanya telling her story. Here, the change in images took a faster pace. I also believe that the length of the voice over and the number of pictures were decided upon based on a key criterion that both should stop as the singer sings the line, “Ooh I hate to see her go.” So, graphically, we can almost look at each picture, and one key point that is put across using one or two lines through the voice over, with the music running along until that crucial line, as shared earlier, during when everything fades out into a white screen.