Matthew McConn
CUIN 7358
Fall 2008
Final Project Report
My digital story project describes the interpretation differences of the descriptions of Ichabod Crane from Sleepy Hollow through various illustrations. The major objectives of the project is to show the illustrations that work and don’t work, and how the illustrators interpretation of the text may have effected the overall success of the illustration.
As a child, Disney’s Sleepy Hollow was my favorite cartoon movie. But in elementary school, I never read the original text by Washington Irving. Then I took History of Children’s literature, and I was assigned Irving’s Sketchbook, which had the 40 page retelling of an old Scottish tale titled The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The descriptions of the characters, most notably Ichabod Crane, matched Disney’s illustrations exactly, and that got me wondering: was the success of that movie a result of the illustrator’s staying true to the author’s descriptions?
This project could be used as an introductory presentation for students learning about children’s illustrators, either in a classroom setting or for a convention, and I believe the topic would be interesting for anyone studying children’s literature.
I kept it pretty simple. I really only used Photo Story, and all of the images I found on line through a Google search. The music I created on Photo Story, and the descriptions from Irving’s original story Sleepy Hollow.
My first idea of the project was to discuss the illustrative differences of the entire story based on children’s books. But as I began my research, I found out that there aren’t any versions of Sleepy Hollow as a children’s book that are accessible. They were out of print, and nothing that was as popular as the cartoon movie. But I found out from my initial research that there were many illustrations of Ichabod Crane, good and bad. So by the time I sat down to write the story board, I had a ton of information and images on Ichabod Crane.
I really only had one challenge, and that was the poor quality of my narration. However, that was easily fixed by checking out a higher quality microphone. Because this was my first time to ever put a digital story together, I chose to work entirely in Photo Story, which made the process much easier. So while my digital story is not as sophisticated as it could be, it was done on a level that I could handle.
I believe that the most significant thing I can take away from the process of creating this digital story is the fact that because I’m now proficient enough with a program so that I can use it in my classroom and teach to my students so that they can utilize technology in a way that they hadn’t before.
I’m not technologically savvy at all. This project gave me a certain level of confidence with technology use that I didn’t have before. All the aspects that were involved in learning to create this project, I will now be able to use in my classroom, like blogging, digital photography, photo story, audacity, and Picasa. Now I not only feel confident about using these programs, but I’m confident enough to teach my own students how to use it.