Northwest Institute for Social Change: The Blog

Portland: Two separate lives

V<a href=’http://altacefsingapore.cx.cc’>ancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon are only 12 minutes apart driving time according to Google Maps but to me they feel more like days.  This might be due to my commute which can sometimes be up to 90 minutes long.  Having this summer documentary program located so close to home has its advantages and its disadvantages.  Being able to go home and relax with my family and dogs has been wonderful but spending so much time in Portland and away from ‘home’ has distanced some of me and my friends.  Balancing life in Vancouver with this enlargement program has forced to examine what could be very helpful with my next step into college.

Making new friends is something I haven’t had to do since Elementary School and I have always been quiet and shy around people besides my friends since.  After almost 7 weeks of the program, I can honestly say I’ve changed…well a little. I’m still quiet but I’ve made new friends. Now some of them know how I’m actually goofy and dorky and like to make weird noises late at night too.  Since the documentary film is coming to an end I’ve been spending a lot of time at Portland State. Mostly staying up really late trying to find some B-Roll to cover Jose’s comment about being late to school (google image of a clock…I think so).  Never leaving Portland has been difficult when my friends are completely on summer vacation.  They’re never busy and I’m always busy.

buspar 5mg

All in all I am excited to move to Portland next year, but I’m also ready to spend the rest of my summer in Vancouver.

Portland: A Rather Ironic Discussion about Being Concise, in 455 Words

As much as learning about movie-making skills (technical and interviewing) and receiving daily reminders in the form of more or less scathing criticism [cough cough Phil “Fussy” Busse, haha ] on how to structure a story in an interesting and compelling way have been really useful and made me think a lot differently about what goes into a good documentary, I think there’s also something incredibly valuable in learning this stuff so that I can look at the kind of work with which I’m familiar from a new perspective.

I’ve always been really involved with social justice organizing (i.e. non-profits and unions), both on campus at college and in “real life,” through various internships and volunteer stints. I know I’m not an expert, but I definitely considered myself very experienced in this area. After interviewing one of our characters who is involved in the non-profit world, however, I’ve realized how critically important it is for activists as interviewees to be clear and concise about what exactly your schtick is and why it’s important. We keep hearing this drilled into our heads as the documentary-makers: we’ve done a lot of talking about how to make your “pitch” to someone who might potentially show your documentary or be impacted by it (i.e. someone with political power) – how would you describe this story to a friend in one minute or less?

It’s an extremely challenging thing to do, especially when one is inundated with hours of footage and just totally mired in all of these supporting details. In looking at our footage, one of our rather inarticulate interviewees had an extremely difficult time summarizing the program we’re focusing on and would jump around from clause to clause, detail to detail, without ever really concluding a sentence. Not only is this a nightmare on our end during the editing process, but it really hurts the good PR that the program could gain from this. If our interviewee had been able to give us 2-3 sentence soundbites instead of literally two minutes of rambling, just think about all the wonderful things that would have been said that we could use in our documentary that could really push the story forward, instead of totally unusable senseless words that we have to dump from the story completely.

I really value details. I mean, I REALLY value details. I love them, because I think that if everyone was just a little more detailed with the things they say, a lot of conflict could be avoided, as the people listening can better understand the context and thought process that the led the speaker to his/her conclusions. However, through looking at documentary-making in the mirror, and at activism from across the table, I’m realizing the importance of “meaning before details.”  Clearly something I’m still working on.

-Emily

Portland: One very bad habit

I am a workaholic. I try way too hard to accomplish far too many things. It’s probably not humanly possible to complete all the tasks I have set out for myself.

But then there’s caffeine.

It’s what keeps me going during the school year. In order to complete piles of homework, respond to millions of e-mails, show up for work every day, prep magical substance that half gives me energy and half serves as a placebo to force me to remember that I have energy. It’s a wretched habit, but we all have our weaknesses. Don’t judge too much.

So what is the drink of choice? Coffee? Too strong. Tea? Too weak. Soda? Gets old. Energy drinks? Just ridiculous enough to possibly be dangerous. YES.

To maintain this ridiculous at-school lifestyle, I usually “detox” by going caffeine free during school breaks—fall break, winter break, spring break, summer break.

But not this summer. I’ve remained caffeine free this far, but now that we’re going through the editing process, I can sense my creeping addiction whispering to me, “Monster. Amp. 5 Hour Energy. Red bull. Full Throttle!”

Editing is always an intense, nasty process, but at NWISC, we tighten an already tight schedule. Check back with me on Friday morning. The work will be done, it will be great, and we will be proud. But Emily’s and my recycling bin won’t be a pretty sight.

— Sara

Portland: Bow Down to The Process

Humility: a concept discussed in most American circles in an antithetical context. Did you even understand that? Exactly what I’m talking about it.

‘If it wasn’t for the hard work and support of blah blah blah blah, I never tonixthe.cx.cc’>would have . . .” Translation: I’m amazing and so is the stuff I was awarded for doing and now I have to endlessly thank these people despite my lack of sincerity.

That may be taking it a notch too far, but I find the concept of humility underrated and well. . . humbling. And wise, too. The more I reflect upon the post-production process that each of our documentary teams are currently entrenched in, the more humility’s purpose comes into focus.

During the pre-production stage of our film, our team envisioned a piece aimed at a select audience and specific subset of policy makers. Up until the latter half of today, I lobbied within the group to frame the film in a particular way, shying from the complexities of a particular character I deemed to be a distraction from the documentary’s purpose, convincing our target audience of the merit in urban chicken keeping.

What I failed to see is the insincerity, and in the end, incompleteness of cutting a character’s story or personality down to small sound bites. Hiding what makes the character unique or eccentric takes away from the story that she is trying to tell us, and in the end, what the audience would be most captivated by.

That’s where humility comes in. I’ve learned to trust the process, go with the flow, and attempt to let got of framing the entire work around my own narrow ideas of a persuasive piece. The power of stories lie in the genuineness of their tellers, and through that connection, the audience will listen.

Portland: ummm, we kind of err like met with uhhh Dave Yewman

According to Dave Yewman, Americans use something on average every 4.4 seconds—what is it?
Ummm…
Yes! A disfluency. Um. Er. Ahhhh.

Dave Yewman is a ‘Presentation Coach’ and works mostly with company executives teaching them how to not to say ‘um,’ because apparently so many of us do it all the time. He teaches a whole bunch of other smart, savvy communication skills, which he touched upon during our seminar with him on Friday. Dave explained to us how people like Steve Jobs and Barack Obama, while they may seem casual, are incredibly calibrated when they make media appearances. While Jobs looks like he is talking to an old friend when he’s on stage, there are hours, days, and months of practice behind each and every speech and presentation. He knows the importance of Practice, Practice, Practice. No one is a great public speaker by accident or natural talent, Dave reassured us; it’s all in the nitty-gritty commitment to practicing again and again and knowing your material to the max.

Figuring out what your audience actually cares about is the key to making an impact, which is of course what we are working on with our documentary narratives. Dave also gave us advice for our presentations to City Council and for other presentations we will have to do in the future. Some lessons learned—eyes will always be ears, so pay attention to your physical appearance. Nixonian eye shifting and sweaty, wringing hands are a straightaway to losing your audience’s trust. And when you say “I’m really excited to be here,” make sure that the audience actually cares—most likely they would rather see and feel your excitement viscerally than hear you say it. Dave told us that when a speech is longer than 8 minutes, recall does down 92%, which is perhaps why I have always gotten so much out of TED Talks compared to two hours lectures on early colonial literature. And then there’s the golden rule: To make people care, they need meaning before details.

- Katherine

Portland: Learning Video Production

As Caroline mentioned in her last post, we are making a documentary on urban chicken farming.  It has been lots of fun so far.  Filming chickens is hilarious but also extremely hard.  When first brainstorming potential shots for the project, I was imagining close ups of chickens: head bobbing, clucking, pecking, scratching.  But when we actually went out and filmed the chickens we realized just how hard it is to get a good shot.  Chickens move around so much and they’re pretty camera shy as we found out today.  We had to bribe them with sunflower seeds but even then they knew we were up to something as the three of us squatted right outside their coop with our huge boom pole microphone and  camera, excitedly cooing to coax them out.  We were trying to get some good chicken clucking sounds for the documentary so I extended the boom pole and stuck it into the chicken coop but apparently the birds mistook the microphone wind screen for some sort of animal ( it does look like a opossum) and they all scattered around the coop, blowing up dust and squawking, terrified.  Oops.  Hopefully I didn’t traumatize them too much.

I’ve also learned from these shoots that there is always more to learn about video production.  There is always something that can go wrong- equipment can stop working, batteries die, memory cards fill up, mysterious settings turn on, etc.  Only by experiencing all of these incidents and then meticulously planning ahead for the next time can you manage to avoid them.  Through this filming experience I’ve learned that every shoot teaches you something new, even if it’s just a trivial lesson.  It seems the only way to learn is through doing and messing up.  Luckily we have plenty of opportunities this week to shoot, mess up, and improve for the next time.

Rachel

Portland: Connection, Change

One of the things about this program that most strongly affected me at the beginning, and has been a continuing theme throughout (not excluding my last post), is the rather embarrassingly simple idea that human connection leads to change. I remember interviewing Amy as one of the first exercises we did at camp and listening to her talk about how much she loves theater and acting and that to her, the human body is an object, a medium through which experiences and ideas can be conveyed. It seems kind of simple, but I had never really thought about acting that way before: the body as a vessel for all the un-sharable aspects of being human – feelings, thought processes, ways of understanding – all of these are things we can describe to each other, but never really feel in the same way that the describer experiences them, but are rather felt through one’s own experiential lens. Inspired by Amy, I now see theater as the playwright describing his/her experience through real, animated people – a medium that makes the gap between experienced and described a little bit closer. And that’s what’s really incredible about this whole documentary-making process (and actually, just being a person in general): through interviewing Amy, a connection was made, and I was changed for it.

When I think about all the people I’ve met in these few weeks, whether they be the other NWISC fellows and staff, the guest lecturers and instructors we’ve met with, the people we’ve interviewed for our documentaries, or even just the people I’ve met socially here in Portland, I’ve seen and heard an incredible diversity in the human experience, and have been changed for it. I think that people tend to think of “connection” only in the sense of recognizing a commonality, but a connection can be so much more: something that makes you challenge your own assumptions about people, or even something that you vehemently disagree with. A connection is a joining of two live wires that can electrocute or cozily illuminate. Either way, the situation is changed.

Forgive me the philosophizing, but I really believe that connection is the power in documentary-making, and it’s a beautiful thing to make connections with people as the radio/film-maker, and then to reconstruct it in a medium that describes those connections that have been made. I’m going to quote from something I wrote for this program earlier in the hopes that it better explains what I’m getting at:

“Looking through old journals, I’ve had a few ideas about how I want to be remembered, including one embarrassing account from 2006 in which I wrote, ‘I want to meet people – millions of people. And affect their lives in some way just by being me and appreciating.’ Although I always re-read that with somewhat of a cringe, I think that a fundamental truth nevertheless lies beneath this naïve egotism: human connection can truly be a force for empowerment and social change. I want to be remembered for revolutionizing the way that people think about their daily interactions with each other; for empowering communities by publicly projecting the beauty, pain, intensity, and intelligence of their experiences, thoughts, and innovations to a new community – ’speaking Truth to power,’ whether that power be one family in their living room, a community organization grappling with similar struggles, or a global institutional body.”

I love the access that this program and working in media give to making new connections. If not for making these documentaries, I probably wouldn’t have ever had the opportunity to speak with Jose, an eighteen-year-old from East County, about what kind of car he wants to buy and why he “messed up” in high school (while driving around in a big pink van that sells VooDoo donuts), or talk with Sherry, an Executive Director, about the house her father built and how she applies a program model she developed for the church to a secular neighborhood agency. And now you have the opportunity to “speak” with them through the social meta-narratives that our project groups weave them into, and be changed for it, whether you know it or not.

-Emily

Portland: ‘Otherizing’ countries, ‘otherizing’ kids

At Whitm<a href=’http://500mgproblems.cx.cc’>an last spring, I wrote a tidy little discursive analysis about Orientalism in the European Union and the way it manifests itself as a rhetorical and (consequentially) literal exclusion of Turkey from the EU.

I really had no clue what I was saying. I pretty much fancied myself as Edward Said for a month and wanted to annoy my advisor with my obsession with the analysis of discourse.

Courtesy of Hellenic Communication Service, L.L.C.

But the paper did bring an interesting theory to my attention: Creating the other, or otherizing. The idea that you create distance between yourself and that with which you are unfamiliar, simply because it is unfamiliar, and because it is easier to stereotype than to understand.

As I studied, I came to conclude that basically everyone does it, despite how many -isms or -phobias we might be propagating in the process. I started noticing “otherizing” everywhere, particularly in my non-academic life.

Take, for example, any kid labeled as “at risk” in the United States. They might be “at risk” because they are likely to drop out of high school, are credit deficient, are social rejects—they’re kids we don’t know, and we don’t want to know. So how does this stereotyping affect “at risk” youth?

Political correctness get a lot of shit for being overzealous, overly protective, totally unnecessary. But acknowledging the way words can otherize individuals—even the kids right in our neighborhood—is an important step in constructing a more understanding community. By avoiding labels for its voluntary program participants, it’s a step that the non-profit Urban Opportunities is taking in its job skills training and employment opportunity at the Voodoo Donut van.

For our video project, Emily, Madeline and I are studying this non-profit and its beneficiaries. Yesterday we spent 5 hours with one so-called “at risk” youth who, if anything, overwhelmed us with his normalcy. He’s not going to benefit from being otherized as an “at risk” individual, and neither will we.

— Sara

Portland: Power of The Story

Twitter. YouTube. Facebook. There will be others. Some will succeed, others will fall off the face of the earth well before a billion post a picture on their profile. A common thread runs through the new media boom and it’s no secret what it is.

From religious texts to the trail of tears, events and knowledge have been passed down through the power of story. At the heart of stories are plots and characters and suspense, yes, but a story would not be, without a person telling it.

While societies will continue to divide based upon varying sources of information, it will be individuals and the stories they tell that will captivate and move diverse audiences. This century isn’t just about how flashy, erotic, or accessible information is, but how credible and captivating people are when they tell stories. In the end, it is individuals who make and end wars, oppress and break free, and it is their ability to tell a story which makes them memorable.

The ironic part of this reality is that we all have amazing stories, but most remain inside.

The Nwisc program has taught me to dig for those stories and to paint a picture capturing the essence and beauty of that person’s experience. A good film editor can make a boring story interesting. A great journalist can write well with little to go off of. These skills will remain to be sought after and will continue on, but it is the stand-alone story, the person speaking from their heart, without Final Cut Pro behind them, that will have the most impact, and have the potential to carry their message forward through word of mouth. It is these individuals and their personal stories that will shape history more than anything else. Yes, even more than facebook

-Colin

Portland: Film Shoots, Scores.

Last night was the BBQ, generously hosted by Erika and Richard George. It was great to see everyone involved in the NWISC all together, sharing delicious food and interesting conversation. Christopher, our instructor at PCM, brought an exquisite lemon buttercream pie that left Phil’s peach cream pies looking amateur in comparison. Ashly made a beautiful fruit salad and our host and hostess served an impressive array of toss salad and the classic bbq burger fare. There are only about three weeks left to the NWISC, and my head is swirling with everything that is flying toward us.

Like our film shoots. With only a few days of instruction, our team is about to start filming our documentary about CHAP, the Children’s Art Healing Project. I am sure I will learn more technical skills in the next twelve hours than I have in the past week, as we’ve been running simulations in the classroom. There’s nothing like field experience and jumping in with two feet to rocket you to an understanding of the equipment. While I won’t be pursuing hardcore filmmaking projects after the NWISC, these skills are opening up a whole other realm of possibility. They are one more tool in my multi-media toolkit. It’s great that I will be able to seize opportunities I come across in the future with at least some background in the technicalities of production. Who knows, maybe my flight back to NY in August will be the next serendipitous filming of ‘81-Year Old Sweethearts.’

-Katherine