Ngarrindjeri Media - doco workshop - 2009 January - Coorong SA
Advice: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that this website and video links contain images and voices of people who have died.
The Change Media team were invited to work with the community at Camp Coorong to explore how they could use digital media for social change. 20 Ngarrindjeri community members from Raukkan and Meningie participated in the workshop.
The youth participants had an ambitious vision: they wanted to make a hard-hitting documentary about the water problem AND interview their elders in only four and a half days. To make things even more challenging, a professional TV crew came down from Canberra to document the Change Media process with the Ngarrindjeri team for ABC TV’s Message Stick, at the same time…
This powerful 22 minute documentary presents the real impact the water crisis is having on the Coorong and its people. Driven by Ngarrindjeri youth it examines the effects on Ngarrindjeri culture as well as the damage for all Australians. The question is, what will we do to change it?
The Change Media team worked with the community to identify key issues and stories and trained the participants in digital media skills from scripting, storyboards, video and sound recording to editing.
The team conducted over 15 interviews with Ngarrindjeri Elders and youth to create an informative, emotionally charged documentary. After they recorded the interviews with their elders, the team weren’t keen to edit their stories and potentially loose important information or be disrespectful. We demonstrated how to use their footage to create a film and interview assembly clips to produce a multi-layered DVD: with a short, media friendly 5min trailer, a 22-min documentary and a sub menu with the entire interviews with their elders. During the workshop the 22 min rough cut was screened to over 40 community members and elders. One of the participants gained part time employment as a media officer for Caring For Country, at RUWE Ngarrindjeri Resource Corporation, as a direct outcome of the Change Media program.
Partners
Apple
Arts SA Partnerships for Healthy Communities
Australia Council for the Arts
Indigenous Cultural Support, Office for the Arts, Department of Regional Australia, Local Government, Arts and Sport
Ngarrindjeri Land and Progress Association
Ngarrindjeri Ruwe Contracting