Great stuff. A lot of people don't realise how bad things have been in Nepal until recently, partly because the civil war there wasn't labelled as such. Sounds like a good project.
To most of us here, it seems like an obvious and easy thing to do now, to give marginalised people a voice with digital technology. But I thought I'd share my own negative experience of this here because it has some useful lessons. Last year, I taught video and citizen journalism skills to Gypsy traveller and Roma young people - Britain's social equivalent of Dalits - and most of my students weren't at all interested in making videos, or communicating anything about their lives or community. At the end of it, I realised it had been a thoroughly gruelling and dispiriting experience. Partly this was because of my teaching skills, no doubt, and partly because of the insane amount of sugar and Red Bull they were consuming - but also the classes were compulsory for those attending, and I was only given an incredibly compressed time period by the people I was working for - I would have 5 days to teach them basic skills and then think up, script, shoot and cut two serious short documentaries. The lessons I came away with were: 1) that you shouldn't assume that people will want to learn the technical process of how to make videos, let alone share them online. once they get past the first experience of picking up a camera and shooting with it, a lot of people think the process of doing anything more than taking videos of their friends is boring and pointless and even embarrassing. 2) you definitely shouldn't assume that people want to make documentary video, tell personal stories or address serious issues that affect them. they're not making anything they'd want to watch themselves, like a Hollywood movie or a soap. even if in their conversation, they're full of observations about the injustices heaped on them by society. it takes a lot more than you'd think to convince them that it's worthwhile or interesting to channel those thoughts this way. 3) don't assume that because people have grown up with TV and films, they will understand even the basics of shooting and cutting. they won't. you'll have to teach most of them the basics of looking through the viewfinder and keeping the subject in the frame, never mind how to think out what they're shooting and then make cuts that make sense or aren't an unwatchable mess. (And my own standards for what I consider an unwatchable mess are pretty far below mainstream media's). And so the main two lessons that I learnt were: 4) You need a lot of time - and not in intensive sequential sessions. Preferably classes spread over several months with time for them to do practical homework and play with the kit. 5) You should only work with people who have actually volunteered to learn how to make video, even if that cuts your class size down from fifteen to two. I was working with classes of teenagers who were being given this course as a school activity - attendance was not optional - or if it was, it was an easy alternative to attending an academic class like Maths, so they were attending as a kind of skive. Hope that's interesting and useful to anyone planning anything similar. And I hope none of you have to go through what I went through last year. The low point came at the end, when I was teaching a class of Slovakian kids who didn't want to be there and didn't speak any English. And they'd misunderstood their teacher's explanation of the class, and thought they were each going to get a laptop and camera and fly to Slovakia. But I have to say, most of the other groups weren't much less stressful. Rupert http://twittervlog.tv On 26-Feb-09, at 6:32 AM, Jay dedman wrote: I ran across this project where a couple of videomakers are teaching Nepalese to document their ow lives with video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4M9oeXi3mc http://www.cleanhandsproject.com/ Within Nepals current tumultuous backdrop, the Clean Hands Project provides > a group of Nepali activists and journalists, who are part of the Dalit > untouchable caste, the opportunity to use professional video and photography > equipment and the training to learn how to use it. Often excluded from the > privilege of image creation, Dalits have relied on others to tell their > stories. Co-directors Jes Therkelsen and Phoebe Gilpin spend three months > holding training workshops through rural and urbanized Nepal teaching Dalit > activists and journalists how to use photography and videography to raise > issues of social justice. > An important aspect in this new media world is that we can now get characters to participate in their own story using inexpensive equipment and worldwide distribution. It'll be pretty exciting when we can easily get POV's of other cultures directly from the source. Jay -- http://ryanishungry.com http://jaydedman.com 917 371 6790 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Rupert http://twittervlog.tv/ Creative Mobile Filmmaking Shot, edited and sent with my Nokia N93 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
