This is a guest post from Barbara Martin, Samantha Watson, and Gretel Macdonald from Yuendumu School. They sent us a fantastic video produced from a book available in the Living Archive collection, and we asked them to share how they made it, so others can try as well.

Of course an audiobook can’t replace the skill of a Warlpiri teacher, but it is still a valuable resource. How did we make the audiobook…? Well we started by choosing a book that is popular with kids and adults. We had a think about how we would put the images and the text together using Adobe Spark, and decided that we wanted to add a few more images to bring this story to life. Otherwise the hungry mulyurlinji (perentie) just eats each lizard he meets and the story is all over too quickly!

That’s the great thing about making an audiobook – you can be the director and be as creative as you want to be. Once we had all the images figured out, and Barbara had learned from us younger ladies how to use an iPad along the way, we had to record our voices reading the book. This was challenging, and Barbara had to help us younger ladies to practice, and practice and practice (!) and think about the rhythm of Warlpiri, and how we would use our voices to play different characters. Now that we have made one audiobook we want to make more, and most importantly we want to get kids at Yuendumu School involved in making their own audiobooks.

You can also view this on the Living Archive website – go to http://laal.cdu.edu.au/record/cdu:34270/info/  and click on WATCH (go full screen to get the whole effect!) And send us your ebooks or audiobooks when you’ve created them.