Digital Stories

Here's how I came to be making digital stories... and what happened next

In the autumn of 2000, when I was working at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, I undertook a research trip to California to study the short-form digital storytelling work being pioneered by Dana Atchley and Joe Lambert at the Center for Digital Storytelling (now Storycenter).

On returning to the UK I began to make my own digital stories (including the three presented here) and I quickly came to appreciate the enormous potential of the form as something which television audiences, traditionally cast in a passive role, might embrace as a tool for becoming active participants in the creative process. If only they could learn how.

I decided to adapt the American model as a programme idea for public service broadcasting and pitched it to BBC Cymru Wales as a community storytelling venture. The idea was embraced, given a team, a name — Capture Wales (Cipolwg ar Gymru) — and I was appointed its creative director.

Delivered across Wales through five-day workshops in community halls, the project enabled participants — drawing on their family snapshots and memories — to make and edit short pieces of broadcast-quality TV and to see their work published. A simple enough task by today’s standards but, back then, something almost inconceivable.

The results astonished us. Across Wales photographs discovered the talkies and the stories told, often tight as sonnets, assembled in the ether like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Multimedia sonnets from the people.

Capture Wales was launched with a fanfare in Wrexham, north Wales, by Greg Dyke, Director-General BBC in May 2002 who said:

"One of the things about twenty-first century Britain is that it isn't the BBC telling you any more, it must be an involvement between the BBC and the people who pay for it."

Championed as pioneering, Capture Wales won a slew of awards, including a BAFTA Cymru (2002). It ran for six years. Its team helped to develop many satellite projects in Wales and beyond and hundreds of stories were made.

Since that time, thanks to the ubiquity of the smartphone, ever-faster broadband and brimming app stores, 'user generated content' has become a commonplace integrated offering for media platforms the world over. However, the short-form considered narratives of BBC Capture Wales — lo-res and scrapbook-like as they may now appear but, I would argue, always tending-to-elegance — are not forgotten. The BBC Capture Wales archive is housed in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, where it is available for researchers to explore. Other collections are in the British Library and the Bodleian.