Media Literacy

August 2008 marked the second year of the Blacksburg Stories Youth Video Workshop I cofounded in 2007. This workshop sprung from a love of community filmmaking (first sparked at the FilmFarm in Kotla, Poland, and re-ignited at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia) and the need for constructive summer activities for middle-school youth in Southwest Virginia.

This year’s participants were a diverse bunch hailing from places as far off as Somalia and Liberia and as near as a few miles from the camp headquarters in Blacksburg, Virginia. With the energetic help from Sher Vogel, a graduate student and coordinator of the camp’s day-to-day activities, and the work of three Virginia Tech undergraduate Cinema Studies students, our middle schoolers made amazing documentary videos. Created from scratch over the course of just nine 3-hour days, our 6th through 8th grade students wrote, directed, edited, and shot videos about people, places, and issues they encounter in their own proverbial backyard.

While the product of the workshop (the movies) becomes the public image for the camp, I tend to judge the success of our media literacy training on a child-to-child level. When mothers tell me (as they did this year) that we must increase the age limit so their child can come back next year or that of the dozen or so summer camps their child has attended, Blacksburg Stories is the only one he has ever attended more than once, I know we must doing something right.

If the photos are any proof, the kids had a blast this year! Despite the challenge of having more than one half non-native English speaker participants, the campers bonded with one another, laughed a lot, and build up a wealth of self-confidence when working with computers and other technology.

The title of my favorite video from this year’s worshop was We Feel Good About It!–an interview based and action packed documentary about Blacksburg’s first skate park. I think those same four words sum up my feelings about Blacksburg Stories year two.

During the 2007-08 school year, I worked with fifth graders at Fallon Park Elementary School for an hour each Wednesday as a guest artist. My residency was organized by The Arts Council of the Blue Ridge in coordination with the school’s 21st Century Learning Center Program.

At the start of my residency, I attempted to teach the students to make a live-action documentary. I thought they’d quickly pick up the basics of using a tripod, shot composition, and interview techniques. Certainly, the students I worked with were bright, enthusiastic, and eager to make a movie. What I didn’t count on is that English was my students’ second language and even having a discussion about what a documentary is was both a linguistic and conceptual challenge.

Three weeks into the residency, I realized that our documentary (we had started shooting footage and interviewing students in an after school dance class) would not be one we could finish in short, hour-long sessions, even if we had the rest of the school year to do it.Reaching deep into my bag of tricks and somewhat beyond my area of expertise, I found an idea: claymation!

After all, it wasn’t the technology that I really want to teach but instead the storytelling. Taking just a few of the technical aspects out of the picture, I was able to pare down the class to something they could handle. The new class design gave the students fun, easy tasks that could be worked in to one-hour sessions. The basic elements of the class became:

• sculpting clay creatures with modeling clay
• designing and creating a diorama set
• outlining a plot and story idea
• taking still photographs with a camera on a tripod
• giving voice to their characters using voiceover
• creating a soundscape using the BBC’s sound effects library
• adding titles and effects to the footage (after I imported and cleaned up some of the stills).

Soon after switching to clay, I noticed a big changes in the classroom. My students’ vocabulary was growing by leaps and bounds, even the most timid of students was bubbling over with ideas during group discussions about plot and dialogue, and I found myself not wanting to miss a week’s class, not even for vacation.

What stunned me the most was learning they missed me too: I came back from an conference trip to three hand-drawn “thank you” cards from my students. My next week back in class, I was greeted with, “Miss Ashley, I miss you so much! It’s been forever since we have class!”

Our final class was bittersweet. I gave each student a new, unopened back of clay, a book about drawing animals, and a DVD of their finished film. Together we watched our finished work on the school’s biggest television and I smiled and nodded as they told me about their next big movie.

If you’re a filmmaker looking to learn to create (or how to teach) claymation or simple stop-motion animation, you’ll definitely want to check out this site.

My path to filmmaking began in 2004 with the London Documentary Filmmakers’ Workshop in Kotla, Poland. My experiences documenting the life of a small Polish village, and the responsibility I felt preserving a place so beautiful and a way of life so threatened, was strong enough to make me abandon my PhD studies for an ever uncertain career in filmmaking.

Two years later, I found myself in Temple University’s Film and Media Arts Program, and working as video facilitator for Scribe Video Center’s “Precious Places”–a community video project dedicated to documenting the “precious” and often endangered neighborhoods in Philadelphia. As part of this project, I spent most of 2006 working with the Yorktown Community Organization in North Philadelphia. Over 10 months, I taught members of the community, many of them middle-aged or senior citizens, to conceive and shoot a short documentary about their neighborhood, which we edited together throughout the fall semester. Working with Yorktown while a Temple student was especially appropriate in light of the threat Temple University housing poses to the survival of the Yorktown neighborhood.

After a well-attended premiere at Philadelphia’s I-House in February, our video, “Yorktown: You Are Here,” was chosen for a special screening at the Philadelphia Film Festival of select Precious Places projects that were created over the Scribe program’s three year tenure. Though the experience was, at times, daunting and frustrating, I found myself forever connected to a Philadelphia community I would have otherwise called a ghetto; I made friends in an area of the city I would have otherwise never dared to enter. With this small film, I became a part of something much bigger than myself.

Now, another year down the road, my journey has come full-circle: I have returned to the American South, not terribly far from where I grew up, and I am directing a community video project of my own making: Blacksburg Stories Youth Video Workshop. While I never thought I’d voluntarily sign-up to entertain twenty middle schoolers at 9:30 each morning for two weeks, the experience so far has been amazing. In just three days, I’ve seen teens and “‘tweens’” go from making comments like, “Documentaries aren’t movies,” to telling me that my taped interview subject should have been “framed with more headroom.” They are hyper, brutally honest, and, like me, willing to see the stories in the life of their small community.

It’s hard to talk about Blacksburg these days without a mention of the events of April 16, 2007. Though I’ve only been working at Blacksburg’s Lyric Theatre since December of 2006, by that time I had already been warmly welcomed into the community. On that day, my theatre lost three volunteers in the shootings, and my partner lost one of his colleagues. I dare say not a single person who lives, works, or studies in Blacksburg was untouched.

Though I began planning and writing grants for Blacksburg Stories well before April, I believe now, more than ever, in this project’s mission. If we can, as Paul Harrill likes to say, convince children that ‘the world is interesting enough,’ then maybe we can create an audience for films that don’t rely on violence, special effects, or multi-million dollar budgets for their entertainment value. Maybe one day small stories will be enough.