EC: Building Documentary Cultures With Urban Youth and Their Communities in Neoliberal Times

Extra Credit Assignment: Report on Codes and Modes Conference Panel

Panel B:  Building Documentary Cultures With Urban Youth and Their Communities in Neoliberal Times

Sunday, November 9 at 1:30 – 3pm: 
Location: The Lang Theater, Room HN424
Participants: Steve Goodman, Lora Taub-Pervizpour, and Nitin Sawhney

This panel examines youth media’s effort to produce a culture of documentary that creates critical space and opportunity for young people to engage in documentary making as a means to speak back to their structured powerlessness. It will focus in on the growing impact of venture philanthropy currently insinuating neoliberal market-driven initiatives and ideology into the structures and practices of youth media, threatening to dismantle work that grows out of the social documentary tradition.
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Each of these filmmakers had incredible presentations of their varying types of youth documentary filmmaking ventures. They all focused on social rights and liberties of the marginalized or impoverished. Steve Goodman, from Educational Video Center, explained that he used the camera as a "tool for exploring the conditions of our own lives". He gave young people living in Harlem cameras to bear witness to social conditions of injustice and document what was taking place. These young students were able to move from a place of shame for their negative to conditions, to making it a conversation, publicizing it, and turning it into a public problem needing to be fixed. This teaches the kids to have become active in the betterment of their communities and empowers them to take steps to do so.

The second panelist, Lora Taub-Pervizpour, said that she worked at a program called HYPE, a youth media program that uses private college funds for students with impoverished backgrounds. In this program, the kids get to learn how to use the documentary film as a catalyst for community change and using film to spread knowledge to the public. This connects them to a better environment and to something similar to a college education, which is normally an unlikely decision. They try to use the skills they learn to re-imagine their futures and educational possibilities. As a side note, Lora claimed that there is too much of an emphasis on computer programming and app development in after school programming. She said that this is causing people to be part of the "economy of digital capitalism" instead of focusing on social documentaries. Lora presented this in a very negative manner and was visibly upset about the situation. Personally, however, I think encouraging children and teens to code is one of the best things we can do for the kids' minds and for this country.

The last panelist is a teacher at the School of Media Studies at the New School named Nitin Sawhney. He spoke about social engagement and the processes that come up int he making of new media. He said that computer science and programming are important, but they don't really shed a light on inequalities going on in the world in terms of race, poverty, war, and more. He has done a lot of work with youth media programming in Gaza, where he has given children in the area a chance to record and describe the difficult situation they are in. He gives them the materials and education to express their emotions on camera and develop their skills in film-making. The work Nitin does builds a lot of self-esteem and confidence in the youth of Gaza as storytellers and journalists. He also explained that big foundations won't fund anything controversial or risk-taking like the work he is doing in Gaza and he needs to fund everything himself and with crowd-sourcing. Nitin has a background in computer science, but chose to work in documentary film-making to express and publicize social and racial inequalities that are taking place. I am currently trying to balance my studies in media and computer science, and found his presentation to be fascinating. It really provided an insight to the different ares of study and gave me a lot to think about in terms of my own future. 

"What I Hear" - Soundwalk Report

My sound walk was around the Hunter dorms on 25th and 1st. While I live at the dorms and go back there every night, I never took the time to fully listen to all the different sounds going on in the neighborhood. The dorms are right next to Bellevue hospital, so I heard many ambulance sirens while I was walking. I heard the clicking of people's heels as they walked by and the sound of cell phones ringing with notifications. I heard people talking from afar and horns honking as cars passed by. I heard the music playing loudly from someone’s headphones and the steady beeping of trucks reversing. I heard construction and drilling coming from a building, showing that it was in the daytime. A ring of a bike bell shocked me as I walked in front of the bike path without checking first. 

The keynotes, or background sounds, were mostly the cars passing and people walking. The sound signals included the ambulances and bike bells. There weren't any particular soundmarks that I noticed that could distinguish this area from others in the city except for all the ambulances that were going to Bellevue Hospital. All the sounds combined made it very clear that I was in an extremely busy and crowded urban area. A sound that was meaningful to me was overhearing a guy’s music on his headphones. Normally I never would have paid attention to something as insignificant as that, but because I was on the walk I paid far more attention to sounds than I normally do. I also heard him playing a song that I know and really like by the Black Keys which was really cool. Overall, the sound walk was really enlightening and educational about the power and meaning of the audio that is always around me and I could hear more if I just took the time to notice.

Audio Interview Project

MEDP160 Audio Project from Rina Schiller on Vimeo.

Trip to the Museum of the Moving Image

On October 29, the class of Media in a Digital Age Pt. 2 went on a field trip to the Museum of the Moving Image. A specific aspect of media production that I learned a lot about while I was in the museum was Automated Dialogue Replacement, or ADR. The museum had an exhibit where visitors can replace dialogue from famous movies with their own voices in an ADR booth. While I knew the basic idea of ADR beforehand from lecture, actually experiencing it in a sound booth made the concept much clearer to me. ADR can be necessary for many reasons, including replacing dialogue for noisy settings or if to release film in multiple languages. This sounds like a simple concept, but when it comes to actually being in a sound booth there are multiple difficulties to ADR. One is perfectly syncing the audio with the already recorded video. It is a challenge as a voice actor to make sure your lips and voice are being heard exactly the same as when you were in front of a camera. Another challenge is acting without any scenery or costumes. As an actor, it is much easier to get into character with the appropriate dress and setting. When doing ADR, an actor has to be in a virtually empty sound booth and yet be talented enough to speak believably as their character. Automated Dialogue Replacement is an essential yet often underestimated area of the media production industry. 

The museum did a fantastic job in displaying the incredible changes in moving image technology. The exhibit featured the history of the moving image, from the original optical toys to the current film camera today. Moving images started with optical devices containing images that spin fast and create an illusion of something moving. The museum also showed "magic lanterns," a device that would use light to project images on a wall. Magic lanterns were the first thing people used to view a moving image for entertainment with a group of people. 

The exhibition then showed the progression of the film camera and how it went from a wooden box with one filmstrip that filmed in black and white, to multiple filmstrips combined for color, to the cameras we have today. The changes in moving image technology have greatly affected the way we view and experience movies because they have gone from black and white with bad image quality and small screens, to high quality color that can be viewed on massive screens. 

Overall, the Museum of the Moving Image was a fantastic way to learn about film and media production in an in-depth and experiential manner.