Participatory video (PV) is a form of

participatory media Participatory media is communication media where the audience can play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating content.Bowman, S., Willis, C.We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Info ...

in which a group or community creates their own film. The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories. It is therefore primarily about process, though high quality and accessible films (products) can be created using these methods if that is a desired outcome. This process can be very empowering, enabling a group or community to take their own action to solve their own problems, and also to communicate their needs and ideas to decision-makers and/or other groups and communities. As such, PV can be a highly effective tool to engage and mobilise marginalised people, and to help them to implement their own forms of sustainable development based on local needs.

Process

* Participants (men, women and youth) rapidly learn how to use video equipment through games and exercises. * Facilitators help groups to identify and analyse important issues in their community by adapting a range of Participatory Rural Apraisal (PRA)-type tools with participatory video techniques (for example, social mapping, action search, prioritising, etc.) * Short videos and messages are directed and filmed by the participants. * Footage is shown to the wider community at daily screenings. * A dynamic process of community-led learning, sharing and exchange is set in motion. * Completed films can be used to promote awareness and exchange between various different target groups. InsightShare, for example, has worked with pastoralists, farmers, marginalised communities and youth in rural and urban settings, street children, refugees and asylum seekers, people with mental health problems, learning difficulties and physical disabilities. * Participatory video films or video messages can be used to strengthen both horizontal communication (e.g. communicating with other communities) and vertical communication (e.g. communicating with decision-makers) Accessed: 2013 11 7

Comparison to documentary filmmaking

Whilst there are forms of documentary filmmaking that are able to sensitively represent the realities of their subjects' lives and even to voice their concerns, documentary films very much remain the authored products of a documentary filmmaker. As such, the subjects of documentaries rarely have any say (or sometimes have some limited say) in how they will ultimately be represented. By contrast, in PV the subjects make their own film in which they can shape issues according to their own sense of what is important, and they can also control how they will be represented. Additionally,

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

s are often expected to meet stringent aesthetic standards and are usually made with a large audience in mind. The PV process, on the other hand, is less concerned with appearance than with content, and the films are usually made with particular audiences and objectives in mind.

Origins

The first experiments in PV were the work of Don Snowden, a Canadian who pioneered the idea of using media to enable a people-centered community development approach. Then Director of the Extension Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Snowden worked with filmmaker Colin Low and the

National Film Board of Canada The National Film Board of Canada (NFB; french: Office national du film du Canada (ONF)) is Canada's public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary f ...

's Challenge for Change program to apply his ideas in

Fogo Island, Newfoundland Fogo Island is a town located on Fogo Island, the largest of the offshore islands in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. History The Town of Fogo Island was incorporated on March 1, 2011 following the amalgamation of four tow ...

, a small fishing community. By watching each other’s films, the different villagers on the island came to realise that they shared many of the same problems and that by working together they could solve some of them. the films were also shown to politicians who lived too far away and were too busy to actually visit the island. As a result of this dialogue, government policies and actions were changed. The techniques developed by Snowden became known as the Fogo process. Snowden went on to apply the Fogo process all over the world until his death in India in 1984. The first community-made video in Canada was the 1969 Challenge for Change video '' VTR St-Jacques'', filmed in a poor

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple- ...

neighbourhood. In order to make ''VTR St-Jacques'', directors Dorothy Henault and

Bonnie Sherr Klein Bonnie Sherr Klein (born 1941) is a feminist filmmaker, author and disability rights activist. Early life and education Bonnie Sherr Klein was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1941 to working class Jewish parents. She attended public ...

trained community members in video to represent their struggle for affordable and accessible medical care. ''VTR St-Jacques'' was shown across Canada and the U.S., inspiring other projects. There has been no uniform movement to promote and practise PV but different individuals and groups have set up pockets of PV work, usually molding it to their particular needs and situations. PV has also grown with the increasing accessibility of home video equipment. An early and significant book on participatory video was published in the UK in 1997 by Clive Robertson and Jackie Shaw, Directors of Real Time Video, and has informed many subsequent books and articles, including the book this article has drawn from. Real Time are an educational charity that pioneered many of the techniques and methodologies still used today, and have been working in the participatory video field since 1984.

Applications

In combination with other methodologies such as Participatory Learning in Action (PLA) techniques, Participatory Rural Appraisal and others. PV has been successfully applied to projects focussing on;

community development The United Nations defines community development as "a process where community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems." It is a broad concept, applied to the practices of civic leaders, activists ...

; promoting local innovation and endogenous development; therapeutic work; a voice for marginalised groups; a catalyst for community-led action; a tool for communicating with policy makers; a means of involving users in their own research for example

action research Action research is a philosophy and methodology of research generally applied in the social sciences. It seeks transformative change through the simultaneous process of taking action and doing research, which are linked together by critical refle ...

, participatory research, user-led research; also for programme monitoring and evaluation or

Social impact assessment Social impact assessment (SIA) is a methodology to review the social effects of infrastructure projects and other development interventions. Although SIA is usually applied to planned interventions, the same techniques can be used to evaluate the s ...

...new possible applications are being continually developed.

Examples

* InsightShare Participatory Vide

* Children As Media Producers (CAMP

* China Villager Documentary Project, www.ccdworkstation.com * Deccan Development Societ

* Participatory Documentary Center of the

IFChina Original Studio IFChina Original Studio Participatory Documentary Center is a non-profit art and cultural organization that utilizes film, photography, oral history, and theater productions to promote local culture and document history and realities from the persp ...

, www.ifchinastudio.org, www.artisimple.com * Video Volunteer

* YouTube channel linking to videos made by children and youth throughout the worl

* The truth lies in Rostock (http://www.spectacle.co.uk/archive_production.php?id=155) is an example of community-led investigation on political riots that took place in Rostock in 1992 * Voices of Women Medi

References

{{reflist Filmmaking Citizen media