New Project Live: A Talent No One Knew We Had

One of the major con­tri­bu­tions I’ve made to Sud­den Flow­ers Pro­duc­tions has been an intro­duc­tion to the inter­net and dig­i­tal inter­ac­tive nar­ra­tive. We just com­pleted the web project that resulted from these classes.

A Tal­ent No One Knew We Had is a col­lec­tion of sto­ries from Sud­den Flow­ers Pro­duc­tions on their con­tri­bu­tion to the 9th anniver­sary of Hope For Chil­dren, the com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tion many of them call home.

While most of Sud­den Flow­ers’ mem­bers have expe­ri­ence using com­put­ers for word pro­cess­ing and video edit­ing, few of them have any expe­ri­ence using the inter­net. We played inter­ac­tive fic­tion, browsed inter­ac­tive pho­tog­ra­phy projects and edited Wikipedia entries. After each ses­sion of playing/looking/editing, we would dis­cuss what the mes­sages of the piece were and how the for­mat helped con­veyed those mes­sages. They were clearly catch­ing on when Adane observed that, “The story doesn’t hap­pen on its own. You make the story by play­ing it.”

I taught them basic HTML and CSS. They were mem­o­rized by the process of writ­ing a few lines of text code and see­ing how the browser inter­preted it into visu­als and inter­ac­tive ele­ments (very much as I was when I first started learn­ing this stuff!). When it came time to actu­ally make some­thing, I chose to build on their exist­ing strength in telling their own per­sonal sto­ries devel­oped through years of pro­duc­ing auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal films. They had recently put a lot of work into the 9th anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion of Hope for Chil­dren, the com­mu­nity organization/orphanage that they are ben­e­fi­cia­ries of. I invited them to write sto­ries about that expe­ri­ence, and we designed a web­site that show­cases those stories.

To pro­duce the piece, I did most of the cod­ing myself, but I updated the group on my progress peri­od­i­cally and explained how every­thing was work­ing. They pestered me inces­santly to get the project done. At first this pes­ter­ing was sur­pris­ing. Usu­ally I was the one pes­ter­ing them (to get to meet­ings on time, to think crit­i­cally, to make stuff). I real­ized that they were just super excited to have the site go live. They are very proud to have the work online for the world to see.

I hope to get an Amharic ver­sion of the site up so that the site can be enjoyed by the small but grow­ing Amharic speak­ing com­mu­nity online.