Stars in a Story

The desire to document and archive projects of all sorts is becoming more and more common. Villiers High School, courtesy of a grant from New Direction (a branch of Creative Partnerships, which is a government funded body who support projects between the arts, artists and education), undertook a storytelling project at their school that brought together artists (of various sorts) and students to study the craft of forming and telling stories, and of course to develop stories of their own. Our role was to document the process for them.

The Blog (ok it wasn’t just a ‘Blog’, we made lots of modifications) we created for them, and to which almost all the project participants contributed, was soon a-buzz with the project’s activities and the thoughts of those taking part. The Blog format is almost perfect for a recording/documentation project such as this, particularly one which lots of people or groups want to share and contribute to. The site is currently private, only the participants can use it, but hopefully when the project finishes in May we may be able to tidy up some of the raw edges and let the world take a look at what they’ve been up to. At the moment there are 135 posts, 80 images, 30 audio recordings, 37 videos and several dozen PDF files and word documents – which, given the scale of the project is a pretty comprehensive set of records I think.

Design-wise the site is very simple. It isn’t necessary or, given the objective, to some extent even desirable to go too far with the visual design (an archive doesn’t have to sexy and Villiers didn’t want this anyway). This keeps the costs down and lets us focus our energies on the content and organisational side of things, so the site works to the very limit of it’s capabilities (obviously this is budget dependent).

We would very much like to use this site as a model for further archival, documentation and/or “project process” projects in the future. We believe that, with certain important modifications, the simple Blog format has a lot to offer people working in that area.

Stars in a Story Screen Shot.