One of the Denver public television stations, Colorado Public Television 12 (CPT12), is supporting an initiative called American Graduate, an ongoing project to help local youth in their quest to avoid the pitfalls of life and graduate from high school. Digital storytelling plays a key role in this initiative and CPT12 has posted a variety of videos created by American Graduate participants. One of them is a story about a girl’s perspective in the foster care system called “This is My Story: Dawn’s Story.”
For this critique, I chose to review the video using the following assessment traits:
- Writing – The author, Dawn, uses a very simple narrative to describe to the audience her experience as a foster child. Details, like meeting her foster parents for the first time and going to church with her “new” sister, draw the viewer into her life. On the whole, it sounded like Dawn had a good relationship with her new family while striving to maintain ties with her birth mother. There was no hint of animosity or malice towards either group of people.
- Flow/organization/pacing – Not including American Graduate promotional material, Dawn’s story runs about 4 minutes. She organizes her experience in a very simple chronological timeline from meeting her foster parents to seeing her birth mother again. The linear progression is effective and, in some ways, takes the audience on a bit of an emotional roller coaster ride. Nothing feels rushed and the photo images appear at a very steady pace. The background music compliments the tone of the video.
- Media application – In addition to the aforementioned background music, Dawn includes a good mix of original photos and video. At the end, Dawn shows a present-day picture of the young woman she has become. On the other hand, I thought she repeated a number of images too often and used some odd video effects that seemed out of place.
Stories of adversity take many shapes. I’m glad there’s a Denver-area television station that is giving young people an opportunity to express their rocky journeys through life.