Digital Story - Who needs Nick Burns when you can build your own computer!

The purpose of this digital story is to provide viewers with a complete narrative that explains what's inside a modern-day personal computer. To many, the how and why regarding how a computer works is a mystery. By giving the viewer a "tour" of a computer's innards, I hope to demystify just what exactly is inside.

Because these are pictures from computers I build myself, there was a familiarity with the subject matter, which both helped me personalize the story and also "own" it, as I had purchased all of the components and installed them with my own two hands.

By starting and ending with brief excerpts from Nick Burns, Your Company's Compute Guy, I hoped to add humor and hipness to a topic that is, let's face it, a bit geeky.

Those interested in taking the next step and attempting to build their own computers will find a number of great resources online, including tutorials like this one from PC Magazine.

Something I learned from this project is that the time can really add up quickly. Even though each of my slides were, on average, about 10 seconds long, my digital story ended up being 4:26 long. This just reinforces the importance of knowing what you want to say and sticking to the script. Tangents and sidetracks can derail a digital story and cause the viewer to lose interest.