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MillimeterVideo Empowerment
Jun 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Kristinha M. Anding
An Appalachian media group helps regional communities tell their stories.
Appalshop's Community Media Initiative teaches video, photography, and web-based skills through its digital storytelling workshops.
Mimi Pickering knows what it's like to be given a chance. The documentarian got her first taste of filmmaking in the late 1960s at Appalshop, the multi-disciplinary arts and education center in Whitesburg, Ky., through a film training program for young and low-income people in the Appalachian region. Today, she heads the group's Community Media Initiative (CMI), which teaches media skills and literacy to underserved communities.
CMI, started through a grant from the Kellogg Foundation, teaches video, photography, and web-based skills through its digital storytelling workshops. Recently, CMI worked with the Mid South Delta Initiative to bring five-day workshops to youth development organizations in Louisiana. Through the process of creating a short documentary, staff and young people learned about basic camera and audio techniques, interviewing, storytelling, and editing. Workshop participants use Sony MiniDV camcorders and DVCAMs, as well as Canon XL1s and XL2s. Editing is done on Apple Macs using Apple Final Cut Pro.
“The idea of the workshops is to encourage these organizations to really begin to think about the skills, training, and equipment needed to document what they are doing in terms of community development projects, raise their profile in their communities, and build a case for further support,” Pickering says.
Closer to home, CMI has partnered with the Kentucky Economic Justice Alliance for the last decade. One piece CMI produced for the group brought the perspectives of welfare recipients to legislators who were about to reform the state's welfare system. CMI was also part of an effort that successfully raised Kentucky's minimum wage this spring.
Examples of CMI's work can be found on the Appalshop website and YouTube, and Pickering says she hopes to use the Web even more extensively in the future.
“There are definitely a lot of communities who feel their voice has never been heard or taken seriously,” Pickering says. “They have really important stories to tell, and we show them that this technology can be accessible; it can be learned and used, and there are people in the larger region and nation who are interested in their stories. This is about empowerment.”
For more information about CMI, visit www.appalshop.org/cmi.
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