Great appreciation to the Amazing Lens Goup

Congratulation to the Amazing lens for their effort in coming up with a film on the promotion of the school leavers attachment scheme.

I pass my regards to our supervisor Alun for his towards this program in conjunction with his colleague Chris High. He spent most of his time with us even after his wife had a problem.We do appreciate that.
Goodbye.

May God shower all those who made this project a successful one  with his unlimited blessings.

 By Bernard

My new favourite PV exercise

A lot of what I use in workshops goes back to a group I got going at the Open University called the PV-OU Research Circle.  Often we'd find ourselvs trying things out without quite knowing where we were going.  Getting stuck and improvising was extremely productive and many fine ideas like 'evil interviews' were born.

The video logo exercise dates from a little later, but had the same quality.  At a departmental training for making new media I found myself with a very short patch to fill and came up with the idea of asking the same simple question to a set of people talking directly to camera with pretty much the same shot.  The result sat on the front page of the departmental web page for a good two years and I still enjoy showing it as an example of what's possible in a very short time.

It works by following a sequence of short questions, and editing so the answers are almost superimposed.
This time around we combined it with a title sequence from the disappearing game, which has the same punchy feel to make something that quickly gets across a feel for the who the group are and some of the energy and feelings at work.

Being a sound girl

Being a sound girl was the most fascinating role that I played during the one week course. I had never before imagined how exciting it would be. Listening to nature through the connections I made was one of the things I enjoyed besides the fact that I was one of the important people behind the scenes. This, however, does not eliminate the fact that it was not all rosy balancing the sound  from the environment and that of interest. The co-operation offered by my team mates played a key role in ensuring that the activity was  a towering success. Neither do I forget the guidelines offered by Chris in a bid to ensure that my output especially on the sound systems was high up on the Richter scale.

All the way through

An important part of learning video is that it's hard to carry out parts of the production cycle until you've seen the whole thing.  Thinking about filming or scripting like an editor makes for better films and is hard to do until you've seen an edit.

So if there's time it's good to take groups through a whole production cycle before they get onto films they really care about.  The important thing is not the quality, but rather the opportunity to work on everything.  In this case we also used it to introduce post-production.  Here're the results:

Getting the first media going

An important part of participatory video work is getting participants thinking like film-makers. The best way I know of of doing that is making films....Trying things out, looking at the results and discussing it.  This also helps with other things like being comfortable with the technology and the pressures of being on camera, but I'd still say the biggest pay off is learning to think through how something is going to look and feel to an audience and then getting interested in how to achieve particular effects.

One of the things I'm working on with Al is a set of exercises and games used in PV to offer this space to think.  Here's the results of a good trustworthy favourite, the disappearing game:

Pitching ideas

We've divided our participants up into 3 groups and asked them to work out names for their newly formed production companies.  The result was

• Sonnet productions
• The Amazing Lens
• NED

 Al and I have taken the role of executive producers with a set of films we would like made.  We pitched four ideas, and then asked them to discuss them and come back to us later with their own pitches.  One idea per group and preferably different.  I've no idea what will happen, but the ideas going in are:

• An interview with a future self
• A promo for the SLAS
• A documentary about one person's journey through SLAS
• A family comedy or drama about a child leaving the family to study further.

At the end of the day, the students pitched back and we have

• An interview with a future engineer
• A promo for SLAS
• A drama about a single mother and her off to KEMRI son

Getting going right

Today the challenge is to set the attachment students up well to make good films by the end of the week.  So there's an emphasis on building up skills and awareness of how to make films, but also organising themselves and working together.

Our planning yesterday was held up by all sorts of normal setup snags, and so I'm up early in the remnants of a world cup game to finish writing up the plan for the day.  It's not that there isn't a plan, but part of the aim of the week is to leave Al and his team with a good set of notes and resources for their work in local schools.

Kicking off

It's a great feeling to be working with a group on a video project again.  My first impressions of the 2014 SLAS group is that they're bright, willing and soaking up everything they can.

I'm in Kilifi visiting my PhD student Al for a week to work on facilitation skills with him.  We're using the presence of a group of 9 school leavers on an attachment scheme here at KEMRI to develop some ideas for how to use video in schools.

The attachment scheme is an opportunity for school leavers to visit at KEMRI over 3 months and learn more about what goes on there.  Its an opportunity for them to think about their futures and whether that includes more study and a career in science or research.