Favorite Digital Stories

"The Ballad of Joe and Nina" was created by Tim Roessler. Tim is Joe's father. The story was recently created in 2012 for the Center for Digital Storytelling. The dad created the story to tell about young love. Joe and Nina began to like each other when they were almost 2 years old. Their relationship at such a young age is a rarity. He talks about Nina constantly, and she writes him love letters. They are almost 5 and they are still together. Whether soul mates or not, they have a sweet, simple love that will always stay in their hearts. Like the message, the video is sweet and simple. The speaker has a smooth voice that is easy to listen to.  The creator does a great job showing pictures that match the content.  First, he shows multiple pictures of his son to make you familiar with Joe.  While talking about the teachers, he places a photograph of the whole class together.  When he talks about Nina, he shows pictures of her.  He displays a few of her love notes in order to show the cute reality matches what he is saying.  He has a video of them hugging.  Then they are playing board games together.  The sequence of shots is very enjoyable.  You watch them play the board game through a series of photographs.  A video of Nina brushing Joe’s hair back is the last scene we see before it fades out.  This leaves us with an adorable memory sticking in our heads.  The video is out of focus, but the whole story is quite lovely.  I thought the idea of showing them apart at first and together in the end was a great idea.  There is music in the background, however the speaker’s voice and the soft, woman’s voice that is singing is very different.  The complete difference in the voices makes it easy to distinguish which voice belongs to whom.





“Pete’s” was created by Kyle Halle-Erby in 2008 at a Faculty Workshop at UMBC.  The story tells about how a place like Pete’s is reliable and will always be there for you through the good times and the bad.  The first scene is a collage of pictures that form the outside of Pete’s.  It’s a creative way to piece together a picture in order to show the building and its surroundings.  Rather than having a boring picture of the outside of a diner, the photograph becomes like a puzzle.  A person serving coffee is shown when the speaker talks about the waitresses.  I do not like the disconnection of the picture where the waitress is making coffee.  I don’t understand why the photograph has lines through it.  The inside of Pete’s is shown through multiple pictures. The pictures stop being scrambled when the speaker talks about his parents getting divorced.  I believe this is to show that the diner pulls him back together when everything else in his life seems like chaos.  The next picture is scrambled once again to show that the speaker himself is just another piece in the puzzle; In other words, he is just another person in this messed up world.  The last photograph is the outside of Pete’s with silence.  I like the fact that he begins and ends with a picture of the building.  However, the last picture is not scrambled like the first one is.  We get a sense of resolution when the diner is finally shown like it really is.  Pete’s will always remain standing.  There is no music, special effects, or video.  The pictures being in their original state or scrambled are all that is needed to tell the story of Pete’s.  The images are clear, except for the image where the woman is making coffee.  He should have had the woman stand still in order to make the image not blurry.  If she had frozen for a second, it would have been easier to tell what she is doing in the picture.