Finding My Story

In the second of his reports on the Highland Lives project, JOHN BURNS finds both his medium and his subject matter

LAST WEEKEND I completed the training workshop for the BBC Scotland’s Highland lives project. I and a dozen or so folk, all with stories to tell, met up in Synergy Business Park with our three mentors from BBC Scotland.

There were two different styles of digital story telling accessible to storytellers. These styles focus on two different but closely related ways of telling digital stories. The first is simply that people tell their stories through three minute videos. They can make short films and then either voice over, present to camera or use a combination of both techniques.

The second digital storytelling method is called Audio Slide Shows. The name says it all really; it’s a way of putting your story on screen using still images with a voiceover.

I was given a place in the Audio Slide Show workshop. To be honest. I was a little disappointed at first, as I wanted to be able to make a movie but as I became better acquainted with the Slide Show technique I began to see that it does offer a creative potential if not better than video, then at least equal to it.

You can do a great deal with still images, a voice over and music. Firstly, you can vary the images enormously; they can be everything from photos of your Gran to paintings, to drawings to cuttings from newspapers – in fact, just about anything you can think of.

The images can remain on the screen for a split second or for a much longer segment of the show, changing the mood of the film with the images they portray.

What I liked about the slide show concept was its essential simplicity as a storytelling device. Video is a much more complex medium than still photography and, unless you are either lucky or very good – and I’m neither – the results can look amateurish compared with the high-tech productions people are used to watching on TV, and that can distract from the story you are telling.

It’s also a lot easier to make your show with still images as they are more accessible than video and you don’t have the time consuming process of setting up a video shoot.
That said the big question for me was, “What was my story going to be about?” For me my most life changing experience has been living with my autistic daughter, an experience that has been as enlightening as it has been traumatic.

My first instinct was to try and tell something of that story and to try and say something of the lessons I have learned from that particular journey. I had some ideas, but autism is a complex disorder and it’s effects on those who experience it are not easy to explain in a three minute slide show.

In the end I decided to tell a simpler yet equally personal story. Twenty years ago I moved to the Highlands to walk and climb here. Now I help people explore those same Highlands in a much more gentle way. I try to find accessible routes into the Highland countryside for people whose mobility may be restricted.

That story runs all the way from the high tops of the Cairngorms to the much tamer rambles around Ness Islands in Inverness. Telling it has taken me back over the years to friends I used to climb with, and brought back a great deal of memories of places I used to visit in my years amongst rock and ice.

One of the aims of Highland Lives is to tell stories that are rooted in a sense of place, and I don’t think Highland Lives would be complete if it did not say something of the Highland hills that give the place its character.

Perhaps nowhere else in Britain has the relationship between people and landscape been so important in shaping the cultural identity of an area. I’ll be glad if my own small story can reflect this.

Global warming has changed the nature of Scottish Winter Climbing and it’s odd to reflect that in my days in the hills I may have been amongst the last generation to experience “a real Scottish winter.” Now I really know I’m getting old, as I become part of history.

Over the next week or so I’ll be interviewing old climbing partners, revisiting collections of photos showing men who today possess less hair but perhaps more wisdom.

It’s going to be an interesting journey and I’ll also be interviewing the people I walk with today, linking the past with the present. The Highland Lives Showcase takes place in early August, and I’ll be sure to bring you up to date with my journey before then.

© John Burns, 2007