Sitting back in San Francisco, I’m taking a moment to reflect on the beginning stages of our VideoVoice project in New Orleans. Caricia and I facilitated the Train-the-Trainers weekend in which we organized the grass roots of NOLA VideoVoice. This includes (but is not limited to) hands-on-camera work and interviews, community public health discussions, basic film theory concepts, and concept models.

Above left is the middle section of our concept model (the string represents the order in which to achieve these goals) and on the right are our community partners (Lily, Larry, Shawn, and Brittnay).

Above left you can see more of the space at the Ashe Cultural Center in which we held the training and will hold the participant training on March 15 - 16th. On the right is a Theme Chart that Caricia compiled out of word groupings that the trainers put together (these came out of five adjectives that everyone wrote down to describe New Orleans).

We handed out pre and post evaluation sheets to everyone and we had great feedback about how to make the next round of trainings more accessible and hopefully even more successful. The trainers/community partners are all highly motived, highly sensitive and with them we will be leading the participant training for the filmmakers of NOLA VVC. Here is a flyer for the upcoming training:

We’ve learned a lot about the community and how to better target potential participants. Even the flyer above was put together in a participatory manner by everyone at the training. We hope that as this process continues that everyone involved feels a sense of ownership — I for one can’t wait to start looking through the footage I shot while I was down there.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 12:20 am and is filed under Conceptual Roots, New Orleans.