Lessons in Multimedia Storytelling (part 4)

Posted by FlipTheMedia on
Sunday, May 30th, 2010 at 7:44 am

Throughout this quarter, Flip the Media will be featuring some of the best video projects from the winter Multimedia Storytelling classes.

“Cooking Up Ideas, Cooking Up Community” by Michael Bean

The subject of my video was The Food Education, Empowerment and Sustainability Team (FEEST) that meets every Wednesday afternoon at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in West Seattle to learn about food, themselves and one another – all while preparing a healthy and delicious dinner to enjoy with friends and community members.

I chose this subject for two reasons: I love to cook and always enjoy the social nature of cooking with friends or family, and FEEST is a youth-led initiative. I found it interesting and impressive that a group of young people would be taken with the idea, and I immediately knew I wanted to hang around and film them after dropping in one Wednesday to cook with them.

My goals were to highlight a cool youth-led initiative; produce a video that showed youth participating in their lives and communities in a unique way; and give a glimpse into just how amazing the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center is.
I think my video benefited from my strategy to first do some ‘deep hanging out’ – as Scott Macklin likes to say. Rather than simply showing up with cameras and expecting people to cater to the needs of my production process, I went for the first week and simply cooked and established a rapport with the group. (It helped also that I did most of their mountain of dishes).

After that, I had no issues when I came with cameras on subsequent weeks. During the cooking on the third week, I was able to get some really good footage (with the help of Scott), felt comfortable asking for quotes and generally just felt like I was welcome and trusted.

Showing up repeatedly, rather than hoping to get everything in one session, also helped when it came time to piece a story together.

I shot the video with a Panasonic GH1 Digital SLR and a Kodak Zi6 Pocket Video Camera. To capture audio, I used a Rode Mic. I must say, this might have been the most important part of the production process. I am very inexperienced with cameras and had some trouble keeping the camera steady. However, because the audio quality was generally great, it made it easier to not dwell on that less-than-stellar aspect of the video. I used Final Cut Pro 7 to edit.