As our New Orleans VideoVoice Project enters the post-production phase, we are discovering that there are countless ways to coordinate editing. When we first set up our program plan, Anthony and I proposed that the community participants might play a kind of director role. They would select footage, collaboratively develop the storyline, identify key characters and their traits, and then give many rounds of feedback on rough versions of the final film. Although this path might have some benefits, particularly in the way of saving post-production time, there are some real draw backs. Michele Otis, a videographer and community leader in the New Orleans VideoVoice Project wrote this very thorough argument on the importance of building community capacity to use editing software and, ultimately, to edit films independently of professional outside editors.

Hello All,

My name is Michele Burton-Oatis. I am a participant in the Video Voice Collective in New Orleans. The reason I’m sending you all this e-mail, is to address my concerns about the editing process of the documentary. It is my understanding, that the editing will primarily take place outside of New Orleans. And that we the participants are to identify parts of the films that we have shot and state what we would like to see. At that point, Anthony will then take our selections, edit them together and then submit the film’s rough edit for our approval. If my assessment of the editing component of the project is correct, I must express my concerns. The best way for me to do this is to use what I have read from your web site.

“Train them to produce their own media around health and resilience issues that are important to them and their neighborhoods in which they live.”

If this quote is true, then editing is a major component in the process. Each participant has taken the time to go out into the community and shoot things that were important and sometimes very dear to them. This gives you the VIDEO. The editing is how we will express our VOICES. By not fully investing the time to teach us the techniques as stated in your proposal and allowing this film to truly reflect what we have learned would be an insult to our commitment.

“Forming a partnership among these disparate groups is a community-building process that results in collective envisioning, filming, editing, and dissemination of films.”

If this is no longer a goal in this project, are we not just test subjects. If that is the case, than I see little that makes this project and the film any different than the others of New Orleans.

“Freire argued that every individual, no matter how “ignorant” or consumed in the “culture of silence”, is capable of looking critically at the world through collective dialogue with others.”

This statement is very powerful. I truly thank all of you for this project. Because of my involvement, I view the rebirth of my city very differently. I am invested in this project and my community. That is why I along with any other participant who desires, deserves to have every opportunity to gain the knowledge and hands on experience to complete what we have set out to accomplish.

I ask you to consider the most important part of this project if you all are truly interested in hearing our voices.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Michele J. Burton-Oatis

Map of Central City, New Orleans

Tons of community-based participatory research (CBPR) authors and practitioners raise the issue of defining community in CBPR. Several authors in Minkler’s edited book Community-Based Participatory Research for Health speak to the centrality of recognizing and defining community (2003). In Lawrence Green and colleagues’ “Guidelines for Participatory Research in Health Promotion”, they argue that the first question that must be asked of CBPR practitioners is: “Is the community of interest clearly described or defined?” Israel and colleagues write that the first key principle of CBPR is “CBPR recognizes community as a unit of identity”. So, what is community in the New Orleans VideoVoice project? Sometimes I know and sometimes I don’t.

As we walk through the process of recruitment for our project, I realize just how complex the idea of community really is. For example, when we began, it seemed as if this was a pretty cut and dry case of neighborhood = community. In fact, one of the rare pleasures of doing CBPR work in New Orleans, as far as I’ve experienced it, is that many people really do identify strongly with the neighborhoods where they live. Many have lived in the same home, some for several generations. People seem to know the people who live around them, to go to church with them, to have attended high school with them, and many even attend regular neighborhood committee meetings. Well, that was, until Katrina. So, it’s complicated.

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Community-Campus Partnerships for Health is a network that works to foster partnerships between communities and educational institutions that build on each other’s strengths and develop their roles as change agents for improving health professions education, civic responsibility and the overall health of communities. They are a great source for partnership resources and tools, project fundings, and ongoing events.

Upcoming opportunities and deadlines:

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I just undertook a big big thing: a literature review of all the articles on participatory video for health.  This will be most interesting to academic researchers, particularly those that practice community-based and action-oriented approaches to research. I will tell you about how I selected and excluded articles and what I found out about participatory video. In future posts, I will also talk about my findings on photovoice, a participatory approach to research and photography.  As you will see, I did a lot of looking and at the end of the day, only came up with 3 scholarly articles on this topic.  So, good news for new research ideas and bad news for people needing research now!

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We have joined forces with the University-Community Partnership for Social Action Research Network, a community of practitioners, students, university faculty and staff ready to initiate multicultural collaboration addressing local and global community issues.

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We have been pretty immersed in the process of completing our application to the University of California, Berkeley Institutional Review Board (IRB). For those non-researchers out there, this is a committee that looks after the safety and privacy of research participants. Because VideoVoice method and other visual methodologies infringe on privacy in some basic ways, despite all efforts to do so in an ethical manner, getting a research protocol through the IRB process can be harrowing.

Although we just turned in our protocol in yesterday, and we are still waiting to hear what the committee says, here are some tips that I have learned so far:

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