This week on Intersection we talk with three students from the University of Missouri. Last fall Autumn Gholston, Daniel Litwin, Nora Thiemann and about 20 other students spent the semester exploring how to tell stories using sound in a digital storytelling class.
In this episode we hear audio essays these three students produced about everything from friendship to surviving a tornado, and talk with them about stepping outside their comfort zones, writing in new ways and putting their storytelling skills to work.
Listen to the whole show here:
Autumn Gholston created and gathered sound for her story in some unexpected ways.
I'm out on this golf course while people are trying to golf just breaking sticks and I’m like, ‘Don't mind me, I just have me and my recorder breaking sticks on this golf course.’ People were just driving by like 'What's going on?' But I didn't feel weird recording the tornado siren because I feel like on campus, people just don't mind things that happen on this campus. There is someone with a recorder just holding it up in the air, they are just like,"Yeah, that's normal on this kind of campus.”
Autumn's audio essay is about a close encounter with a tornado.
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Daniel Litwin studies Broadcast Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. He says that this class challenged him to approach storytelling in a different way.
We've been hammered in, “You've got to use this kind of AP Style, and you have to write this way for the ear. This, this, this.” We were practicing scripting and all this kind of stuff, and at the same time I had to write a creative story about auditioning for an a cappella group. It was two different spectrums of that storytelling life.
Daniel's piece takes us through his a cappella audition.
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Nora Thiemann says new ways of telling stories are opening up new career ideas.
I'm not necessarily writing news, but I’m still writing stories. Some of it's real and some of it's not real, but I'm learning the components of how to tell stories either digitally or handwritten and hand drawn. I think career wise, it has definitely opened up a bunch of options that I didn't see at all.
Nora's story is a profile of a friend whose whole life revolves around music.
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Intersection's producers are Claire Banderas, Kelly Palecek and Abby Ivory-Ganja