I first started capturing her storytelling using the video mode on our digital camera, around about April, but she soon refused to let me film her. So I tried writing her stories while she told them, using pen and paper. That lasted for only a few stories too, before she caught on. Since then, I've been recording her using a mini MP3 recorder, which is pretty unobtrusive, and transcribing the audio later. She then objected strongly to this as well... Nowadays I use a combo of MP3 and video to record her before transcribing. I only manage to record a fraction of the stories she tells. I always have a backlog of stories on the recorder that still need transcribing, as it's impossible for me to keep up with her. To help new readers, I've marked my favourite stories with a star (*), so at least you have somewhere to start if you don't know where to begin. Don't forget to check the older archives too - there are some gems in there as well!

Sunday 2 December 2007

Snapshots of Bethany**

Just a quick update for Bethany's faithful blog readers. Since I bought the new recorder to record her stories about 2 weeks ago, I already have 8 hours worth of recordings from her - and these are just the ones that she said she WANTED me to record. I haven't had the time to convert them to lower web-friendly resolutions yet.

Here are a couple of brief video clips that beautifully show her animation and expressiveness when storytelling - as you can see she really gets very involved with her own stories. You can't really follow the story in either of these clips, they were much much longer than what I've excerpted here.





Her current batch of stories have taken yet another very surprising twist. Her current main character, Corin, who was formerly Corythosaurus but now is human, has evolved into 10 Corins, some good and some bad, and Larry has fallen in love with him, supposedly because there aren't enough girls in her stories so some boys have to fall in love with boys. Their latest escapades include getting married to each other.. She's also been exploring the theme of premeditated killing. Hopefully this is just a phase that will pass sooner rather than later.

Also, a couple of days ago she drew a set of illustrations of various characters in her stories. Here they are


This is Corin



This is Pip



This is Larry


and Larry in disguise


This is Bets


And this is Fatty


And this is where they all live.

Larry also appears in this last painting she did - he's supposedly the brown blob at the lower right corner of the picture. It's a forest scene, with a path for dinosaurs to get through.

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1 comment:

Moomykin said...

I love her drawing, but even more, her painting. Really makes her story come alive!!

16 December 2007 at 01:52

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