Worlds Touch

Friday Morning at FaithAction

Sheesh...I come in half an hour early for a bit a peace. Slowly make my way into the day. Nobody else here. Life unfolding as it should, and all that. I'm just plugging in my laptop when the phone rings. It's a guy who heard from a guy who heard my Salesforce demonstration last spring. He needs help. Can he stop by this morning. Sure. Give it two beats after I hang up with Dwain and the phone rings again. Another Salesforce lead, this time the woman who runs the largest program for the elderly in the area. As we're talking about possible dates for appointments, the doorbell rings. It's a guy with 3600 diapers in the back of his truck. His pastor tapped his wife to go out and spend the nearly $1,000 they had collected for us on diapers at Sam's or Costco. Meanwhile I have the computer booted up, make an appointment with Ellen and about that time, our new intern shows up. I get her logging the diapers on the computer, and the rest of the staff rolls in.

Whew. Coffee is in order and it's not even 10 am.

But we have added new life to the immigrant diaper program. Fully thrilling. We have diapers to give away to folks who come to see us. They can, in turn, spend their money on other necessities, like for instance, food. And getting them to come in for diapers gives us a chance to meet them and hear about their other needs.

Gotta get our new intern an email address and help her learn a bit about our technology. Before the appointment with the guy who called before 9.

Camera Class

Camera Class from Patricia Perkins on Vimeo.

We worked on using our Flip Videos during the Movie-Making Class on Saturday. It was our first session at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro campus, and there were several glitches. Like...I thought Alfonso knew where we were meeting and he showed up here and didn't know where we'd gone. And Bill showed up at UNCG around noon, and by that time, we'd all gone "on location."

Sara was the one student with all her ducks in a row. She'd asked members of the class to be in her movie, and had doctor's whites and two stethascopes and a very clear idea of what shots she wanted to do and how she wanted them to look. She was a role model for all who participated...me included. 

Tom Lassiter, the volunteer I met at the Design and Technology conference last spring, gave the lecture on using the Flips. I'll publish other shorts of that lesson that DO NOT focus on me, but this is the one that came in today.

Google for Nonprofits

Story Boards

Saturday we had a big job ahead of us: Create shot cards for every shot in our video stories. Everyone showed up. For the first time, the Burmese showed up on time! Bringing food for the group! This time it was the African ladies who were later than the others and so were gently ribbed about being eclipsed by the Burmese.

I worked with David on his tale of overcoming his fear of uniforms. Alfonso came for the first time this week and worked with Eduardo, a very good deed, indeed. Alfonso is the videographer at Winston-Salem State University, a historically black university in the neighboring town of Winston-Salem. Alfonso is from Nicaragua, and put in a few Saturdays last winter, working with our students on editing their movies. I had specifically asked him to come this Saturday because I thought it would be good for him to be involved a bit earlier in the process for this course. When he arrived, I knew he would be perfect to work with Eduardo. He's one of the folks in the course who has been the most hesitant about his creative powers.

At first, he told a riveting tale of being deported and left in the middle of the Mexican desert, but then it dawned on him that people he knows and loves would be seeing this video and he wasn't so sure that was the story he wanted to lead with. What story DOES he want to tell...on the theme of My Journey? Alfonso worked with him and, by the end of the class this week, reported that Eduardo is excited again, and glowing. Yes!

By the time we got to 12:30pm, everyone of our ten students had completed their storyboards, done their shot cards and listed the props and tasks they will need for their live-action sequences. The enthusiasm is high; the sense of self-satisfaction is right up there. People know they are learning, and that feels so good.

Oh, and the American Friends Service Committee, our benefactors, came up with a stash of snacks for the classes. I got our partner, Lori, to agree to supply us with dried fruit and nuts. I've never been in a country in the world where people didn't eat dried fruit and nuts...it is the ultimate cross-cultural snack. Cool!

p.s. The Burmese brought vegetable spring rolls. Hmmm...Maybe we can subtly suggest that our Spanish contingent might want to come with some yummy something. And then the African ladies?

Movie-Making is a partnership between FaithAction International House (including its VISTA volunteer--me), the American Friends Service Committee, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Also in the mix is Worlds Touch, the international tech assistance organization that I founded and direct in my spare time.

A Party at FAIH

The Flips Arrive from Patricia Perkins on Vimeo.

Movie-Making: Finalizing Our Stories

We're down to ten students in the movie-making class, as another of the African women failed to show up. She had babysitting issues, but as I told Amina, who is president of the United African Sisters Association, it's essential to figure out how the babysitting is going to work early in planning for this class. Otherwise, if you're doing it from week to week, it is apt to disintegrate. "I raised two kids," I told the class in my Class Participation Requirement Speech. "I know it's hard to get affordable child care on a Saturday morning. But if you can't manage it, you need to leave the place in class for someone else."

At FaithAction, we require that the churches that house our English classes provide child care. That would be a welcome addition to this project for the next time. That would open the opportunity of this class to many more women.

Our second class, we started with about 45 minutes of videos from other digital storytelling classes. We talked about HOW they were shot, how they were put together. We talked about what was powerful about them and what got a bit too long and not so interesting.

Then we broke up into five groups, each with a volunteer, and began crafting the stories that we will eventually film. We worked on getting a concise telling. We worked on finding the "moral of the story." We worked on finding a place where some kind of change takes place.

And we came up against the first moments of creative anxiety. We are prepared for this-- the way some people freeze when they are faced with the task of creativity. One of our students realized how strong and compelling his story is, and immediately began worrying that his wife wouldn't like him telling it because she was IN the story. Another, who'd told a very strong story last week, came in this one with a much "happier" tale, one that had none of the structure and power.

We always walk the line, with this class, between telling too much, getting too personal, and sliding into the innocuous, the "pretty story." Too easy to preach about God's glory, or wax into praise of one's dog. It is essential not to push too hard for painful stories. They are always powerful, but perhaps not ready for exposure to the world. Because this class WILL take our students into exposure to the world. We want to post our videos this time. In the last class, we took "educational license" and grabbed snippets from the internet that we didn't have the copyright permission for. This time, we will be more careful about that in order to post the videos online.

I imagine we will lose one or two more students before the full twelve weeks is over, in spite of my fervent speeches about how hard it is to catch up, how difficult it is to get so far behind. We pile on the learning at every session, I tell them several times. You miss one session and while you might be able to get some help from your classmates during the week, you have lost not only the material, but the community-building we do every week.

We ordered ten FlipVideos last week and they are supposed to arrive today. I'm really looking forward to having them in my hands! What I'd REALLY like is to be able to hand out these little camcorders at the end of the class. They were only $50 apiece plus tax with our nonprofit discount at FlipVideo. I've told the class that I will order videos for them if they'd like. The class so far is free for them ("No," I hear JF saying, "they have to pay with their TIME-- every Saturday for 12 weeks.") so we can simply offer them an option of paying $50 for the class and getting a video camera at the end.

I bought flash drives for everybody before the class started. A notebook, a pen, a flash drive is what they get as students in the class. Next time, I would like to have better planned snacks. We were spoiled at the West End Ministries class because Elizabeth brought healthy stuff every week, supposedly keeping her receipts, but in the end just waved away the idea of getting reimbursed. It was her donation. It is nice to have coffee (we're helping use up the "sweat-shop coffee" that we are phasing out), and tea. And it would be great to have orange juice and something to munch on.

Storytelling Made Easy

Telling a story is already the easiest kind of interpersonal communication. We hardly even notice that we're doing it. "Why I'm Late to Work." "What Happened When the Report Card Came." "What She Said When I Said What I Said."

What we do in the first class of Movie-Making is just exactly that: We tell each other our stories. A group of the class volunteer leaders-- in this case Joe Blankinship (the filmmaker-turned-Presbyterian minister who leads the first classes), me, Jean-Francois (my husband and partner in this endeavor), and Selma, an Angolan woman getting her PhD in the effects of immigration on families and social structures-- sit down and brainstorm what some powerful stories might be for our audience. For the class at West End Ministries in February, we had Home, Work, Finances, Childhood and My Hero on the list. For this one, we had My Journey, Home, and something we called First Impressions/Second Thoughts.

As soon as we've finished introducing one another, we tell the class to take two minutes to think up a story on the first topic. We go through some of the basics of a good story, how it needs some sort of change from one situation to another and how it is more powerful if it has the teller's feelings in it. We also say it has to be short-short-short. The final movies we are creating need to be about as long as a longish advertising commercial-- a minute. So we have to start now whittling and winnowing and shaping so the story we tell is not long.

"It's harder to tell a short story than it is to tell a long one," Joe tells the group.

And then we go around the room. Every single person in the room has to tell a story. That's the rule. None of this, you're the students and we're the teachers and so you tell and we don't. I think this is one feature that makes what we do so powerful-- we are all opening ourselves up to the power of our own stories, not just the students. Even the newspaper reporter in the room -- who tried to get out of it a little before she realized the logic -- told a one-minute story about "My Journey."

As the stories started to emerge, Joe used them to refine the idea of what a good story looks and feels like. But the truth is that asking a group of refugees (and it looks like most of those in our class are refugees) to talk about My Journey is a sure-fire, guaranteed way to get a set of gobsmackingly powerful stories. There were times on Saturday when the power of the individual's story was so palpable we could feel the energy crackling through a profound, awe-struck silence.

We had one story like that the last time: Mark's story about getting his grandmother's love -- and food -- only when she was paid. "Money CAN Buy You Love" was his title and we were all struck dumb with the power of that story.

Saturday, we had at least three stories like that.

We also had a whole roomful of stories that just rippled out as easy as pie. Because storytelling comes naturally to humans, wherever they're from.

This Saturday, we'll let our students tell another story-- this time, the one they want to film and present. And we'll start working on getting them down to a minute, finding the crucial moment where the pivotal change happens, and beginning to think of how to VISUALIZE them in a way we can capture.

Movie-Making is a partnership between FaithAction International House (including its VISTA volunteer--me), the American Friends Service Committee, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Also in the mix is Worlds Touch, the international tech assistance organization that I founded and direct in my spare time.

What's in the name "Movie-Making"?

Why do we call it "movie-making" instead of the more popular and trendy "digital storytelling?" I thought long and hard about the issue and decided that it's basically a marketing issue and the folks I want to market to are my students, that is, my clients, not my funders. The nonprofit tech world is awash (and has been for years; this is nothing new we're doing here) with "empowerment through digital and social networking and storytelling."

Everywhere you go, you're told that it's stories that sell, stories that have power, stories that make your "brand." I know that's true, but getting on the bandwagon has never been part of my modus operandi. What I have wanted to say to my potential students is: We will teach you to make a movie. It's that simple.

And it was that desire--to make a movie--that I saw again and again in the faces of our students last Saturday. A couple of them want to join the 21st century, to get with it, and several of them want to do music videos because music is central to their lives.

I want this space to expound on the "how-to" of the class. We have at least one volunteer who is coming explicitly because she wants to use these same techniques in her classroom at the Newcomer School, where children whose parents have just arrived are taught English and introduced to American Life. What better way to land someplace than to document what you see, what is weird and amazing and terrible and wonderful about your new home?

Class One:

• Introductions all around.
• Explanations that this is GRASS-ROOTS video, meaning that we are not looking for perfection, for professional polish, but for stories from our hearts, and just to learn the process.
• Interviews--students in pairs interview one another and then "tell the story" of the other to the class.
• Break
• Storytelling around the proposed themes--everyone in the room, volunteers, teachers, students, even the newspaper reporter must come up with a one-minute story about each of the themes proposed for the class. I think this may be worth a whole blog entry, so I'll save it until tomorrow.
• Choice of the class theme. Between our teacher, Joe, and I and the other volunteers, with the class, we agree that "My Journey" had the most "juice," the most "heat," the most "energy," the most power as we went around the room. So that will be the theme of our movies.

Movie-Making is a partnership between FaithAction International House (including its VISTA volunteer--me), the American Friends Service Committee, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Also in the mix is Worlds Touch, the international tech assistance organization that I founded and direct in my spare time.

Next: Improvisational storytelling a key to community building.

Movie-Making for Immigrants and Refugees Class: I

Eleven of the twelve students who signed up for the free class showed up yesterday for the first session. We had five volunteers, all of whom contributed their own stories to the mix when we were story-telling.

That's what we do for the first session: We tell stories. We go around the room and tell them. We interview one another and tell the other's story to the group.

And Joe (the filmmaker turned Presbyterian minister) and I listen to the silences, to the power places where the stories resonate, and we instinctively aim for those places.

It was amazing and wonderful and full of exactly the kind of magic I've come to expect from this class.