A Couple of Digital Stories I Enjoyed

A Wrinkle in Time from Paul Zakrzewski on Vimeo.


Mr. Zakrzewski made this digital story at a workshop sponsored by the Center for Digital Storytelling last month.  He had just taken a trip a month before to Poland to visit Genia Olczak, a woman who was his father's nanny, and hid him and several other Jewish family members during the Holocaust. The story focuses on his connecting to his father through his visits with Genia, and how he sees similarities between him and his father; how his father's hiding as a child led to him hiding emotions later in life, which was passed on to Paul.  He realizes that Genia sees Paul's father as her own son, and without her, he and his entire family would not exist.  The form of this story is beautiful, yet simplistic.  It begins with a black screen, accompanied by some brief text explanations of the audio scene being presented.  He has transported the viewer to a meeting with Genia, yet shows no video; no pictures.  Instead, it is left to the mind to imagine the scene.  Conversely, the black could also be imagined as what his father saw when he was in hiding with Genia -- being forced into the darkness in an effort to stay alive.  The first two pictures shown are a stark contrast, a little boy (Paul's father) is placed against a picture of the Nazi army marching in the streets.  There is no music, no sound effects, no flair -- but that's perfect.  It would almost be out of place in this piece.  The story is emotional, raw...it needs nothing else to intensify that or punctuate it -- that would only take away from the emotion in the narrator's voice. As I said, this entire story is beautifully put together and told, and is very inspirational.







There is very little prior context given to this story.  The only description given is "The digital story of World War II through old newspapers found in a Miami house." And through a tag we can assume that the video was made using the website One True Media.  Though the content of the story isn't very long, I think it tells a great story.  The narrator purchased a house in Miami whose previous owner had died.  Inside the house, she came upon a box of old newspapers chronicling WWII, as the homeowner's husband was a soldier overseas and she kept the papers in an effort to feel close.  Thankfully, the homeowner's husband returned from the war, but the narrator relates her feelings regarding finding the papers, and puts herself in the previous owner's situation.  The form of the story isn't maybe technically superb, but it still fits the gift.  Most of the story is told through personally shot video of the home, and the newspapers (due to their age, it would not have been wise to subject the papers to scanning).  The narrator's voice-over is a little fast, perhaps if it been slowed down the  audience would've been better able to digest the story, yet its point isn't lost because of this.   There is also a bit of background audio that fits the period of the late 1930's and early 1940's.  


As a sidenote, I didn't intend to do two WWII themed pieces...it just ended up that way.