Cinderella Retold

For my final project in my Digital Storytelling class, I created a “new” version of Cinderella. I chose to create an audio retelling of this because out of all of our assignments, the audio ones proved to be the most challenging for me. Since I struggled with them earlier this semsmter, I wanted test myself and see how much I’ve learned.

Our class theme for all of our assignments was the “cover”, keeping this in mind; I thought that Cinderella would provide me with a lot of subject matter to work with. To create my new story, I combined audio clips from the original Disney adaptation of Cinderella, with excerpts from two foreign Cinderella fables. The two stories that I chose to use were The Broken Pictcher, which is an old English retelling of a Cinderella story, and Ashley Pelt, which is an old Irish version of the same type of fable. Since I struggled to find audio versions of The Broken Pitcher and Ashley Pelt, my father and my sister graciously volunteered to read the story out loud while I recorded them. I am so thankful for their contribution. The thought of listening to my own voice over and over while editing the clips made me pretty uncomfortable.

In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, I also included background music to add some depth to the narration. The background music came from orchestral versions of Cinderella. The two songs that I selected were Cinderella’s Waltz by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella and Who Is She (Score) from Disney’s Cinderella by Patrick Doyle.

The last thing that I added to my audio retelling of Cinderella was a background noise. I originally thought that I would add in various sounds of horses walking on pavement or weather to emphasis a scene, but everything I added seemed to muddy up the audio and made it unclear what was being said. Instead, I took 5 second snippet from one of the Disney clips I used, duplicated it, put them together into one larger track, and then cross faded each of the tracks together to a create background noises behind the narration.

To listen to my audio retelling of Cinderella, click the play button on the embedded soundcloud clip below.

Also, if your curious about the different version of Cinderella type stories and fables, I encourage you to check out D. L. Ashliman’s folktexts. This site contains a large collection of fables and folktales.