Capture Wales

The Capture Wales project formed out of a partnership between BBC Wales and Cardiff University in 2001. The project team ran monthly workshops between 2001 and 2008 to help give people the tools to make their own digital stories that can now be viewed on the project’s website. Nearly 600 videos were recorded during that time and are now available on the website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/yourvideo/queries/capturewales.shtml).

The goal of the project was to give production tools over to the public who traditionally viewed themselves as consumers, rather than producers, of media. As a result, individuals were able to contribute unique, personal stories to a multimedia collection of histories. According to BBC Wales, “digital stories are short, personal, multimedia scraps of TV that people make for themselves.” The Capture Wales videos cover a range of topics, from community to birth to animals to humor. In 2009, the Capture Wales project team assembled a how-to reference guide for digital storytelling (see PlanIt X Resource: BBC Wales’ Digital Storytelling Guide).

The original project was supposed to last only two months, but turned into a one year pilot project, then a three-year commission and ended up lasting a total of seven years. During that time, the project team held workshops all over Wales and brought people from all demographics to tell their own stories using computers, scanners, digital cameras and editing software.