Back to Basics: Teaching and Learning Lived-Reality Documentary Filmmaking

Are you a storyteller, activist, community leader or organization working in underrepresented and misrepresented communities? Are you interested in using documentary filmmaking to help your community tell its stories? Look Listen Local (LLL) offers the creative and technical know-how to bring your community’s issues of concern to life for local, national and international audiences. By the end of the training, each participant will create their own short film on a story important to your community.  Then you will use these films to build awareness and advocate for change.

The Look Listen Local Curriculum

The curriculum is organized into 17 topics, each broken down into instructional Presentations, and exercises — Brain-Games, Skill-Builders and the Final Film Project. During the first 16 topics students learn and practice camerawork, editing and sound production through a series of exercises. At the same time, they are learning the principles of storytelling and using this knowledge to develop a 6- to 12-minute final project on a local story of importance to the storyteller and their community.  During topic 17, each student shoots and edits their final project.  

  • Presentations: These include lectures, screenings and demonstrations that introduce all you need to know about each topic. The Presentations include topics such as “Shots and Scenes,” “Editing Setup,” and “Story Principles”. 
  • Brain-Games: These exercises build awareness and analytical skills. They will teach you, for example, how you need as a filmmaker to watch and listen to the world around you.
  • Skill-Builders: Hands-on exercises that cover essential skills in camerawork, sound production, editing, and storytelling. The majority of your learning will come from these exercises, which cover, for example, shooting and editing scenes and developing your story ideas.
  • Final Film Project: These exercises guide you through the development, production and editing of your final film. A successful 6- to 12-minute final film is constructed with a series of scenes that concentrate on the daily experiences of a person and their community.  There should be a storyline that draws the viewer in and takes them on a journey into an unknown or unique perspective. The story should inspire dialogue and action.
Production Image 2
Production Image 1

Learning Strategy

The learning experience is laid out using a combination of text and videos because it is the best way to communicate with our target audience and it provides a reflective learning environment:

  • Our target audience is under- and mis-represented communities who need their experiences and challenges understood from their perspective. We are targeting the usage of this training to community media and development organizations in these communities who have the capacity to organize community members to participate in the training, produce short films and use them for their advocacy and awareness building needs. These materials are designed for use by group leaders, teachers, mentors as well as individual students. The text-based material makes it much more useful for shared engagement and discussion.
  • Engagement and retention of knowledge is best achieved through text-based learning. It encourages reflection, note taking and repeat studying of the new ideas and practices being presented. Video is not a reflective medium – because it is constantly moving forward in time. We become passive when we watch videos which actually makes it a poor educational tool. Interestingly, the act of watching is not ideal for retentive learning. Reading and note taking puts one in an active relationship with the material and provides room for questioning and reflection. Video is best at visualizing experience, which is how we use it to support the concepts being taught.
  • Text-based presentation of the materials also allows for easy translation into a myriad of languages. You should try it! (We explain how below.) It is quite amazing to see so much knowledge so easily translated, and in our testing, the quality is good. The videos are also captioned and auto-translated, which makes the complete experience more universally accessible.

Translation

LLL is presented in English but every module and video can be easily translated.

To translate the module pages, go to your Browser settings, turn on Google Translate and select your language.

For example, if using the Chrome browser:

  1. Click the three dots in the upper right corner.
  2. Select “Translate”.
  3. In the dialogue window that opens, click on the three dots and select, “Choose another language”.
  4. Choose your language.
  5. The text on the module page should be translated into your chosen language.

To translate the videos:

  1. At the bottom of the video screen, click on the CC (Subtitles/Closed Caption) button to turn it on. 
  2. Now captions appear on the video in English.
  3. To translate the captions click on the settings button next to the CC button.
  4. Click on “Subtitles/CC”.
  5. Select Auto Translate.
  6. Select your language.

It is best to have an experienced filmmaking mentor that speaks your native language and English to address questions and review your work.