my favorite digital stories

"Queen of Hearts" is a digital story by Andy Levy.  This story was created during Andy's attendance at a 3 day workshop with Stories for Change.  I like this story in particular because Andy maintains his theme throughout the story--love.  His love for his work, his love for his mother, their love for conversation hearts--all things that others can easily identify with, maybe  not specifically but each of us has memories that are similar to this.  Aside from the background information Andy gives about himself, I don't know anything about him but I can gather from the dates he discusses that he is not extremely young.  This brings me to another message I found in this story.  Even though Andy is older when he loses his mother to cancer, he describes realizing that he was not happy in his career and wanted a change, so he made one...without making the normal excuses we all make for ourselves--now isn't a good time, I don't have the financial freedom, I'm too busy, etc...I also really appreciated the way Andy used his own voice while showing photographs of he and his mother and the rest of their family.  That made it much easier for me to connect with his story.  I loved that to begin the story, Andy didn't come right out and make it clear why he chose the title he did, but through the development of the story, it became clear.  Clear but not overt. 

Patrick Castrenze talks about the death of his father in the digital story "Every Step of the Way" in a way that I think many children with troubled parents may.  The story begins with photographs of Patrick's childhood home and he and his father when he is very young but this is contrasted by Patrick's discussion of how his father died and what killed him--the brutality of his father being almost dead in the living room floor and Patrick, at 17, having to make the adult decision whether or not to keep his father on life support.  I feel that this contrast shows a very authentic side to someone who seems to have had a strained relationship with a parent, but loved that parent nonetheless.  The image of Patrick grasping a handfull of his father ashes and letting a portion of that blow out of his hand as the sun glints off the trees and birds chirp is another stark contrast.  Throughout the story, there is a sort of an internal dialogue that shows Patrick's anger with his father but also good memories he has of his father, which seems to be why he has not yet spread his father's ashes in the Gulf of Mexico like he wanted but hasn't thrown them in the garbage like Patrick sometimes wants to do.  I really enjoy the silence of the video.  Background music would have been too generic--just Patrick's voice and the sounds of outside make the story much more powerful and real.