With the completion of the photostory unit at nearly all our schools, we’ve begun to lay the groundwork for the first video project. It is exciting to plan these classes as I am learning along with the girls and experimenting with the different video editing skills I plan to teach them. I am also fortunate to live and teach with Stella, whose aesthetic and video-editing skills are far superior to my own. Here is one of my first, very humble experiments with Windows Movie Maker…

Pedestrian’s Guide to Street Crossing from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Aside from experimenting with the software myself, it’s also exciting to start the video units to learn more about what the girls have to say about the topics. We are exploring subjects that ask the girls to explain their world to an outside audience that is unfamiliar with certain aspects of their daily life in India. We’ve introduced the girls at Sultan Bazaar and Railway to the concept of audience and I’ve told them that my students in the US will be watching their videos to find out more about what life is like in India. With that in mind, our first video project at Railway will describe the Telangana situation and explain how it affects the girls’ lives. At Sultan Bazaar we are exploring the practice of three-medium schooling and the multilingual nature of India. Hopefully, the Brooklyn students will be able to make one or two videos in response to give the girls over here a sense of what life is like in Brooklyn. They were thinking about making a video that showcases the contrasts between the world-famous New York City that tourists see and their local community.

So far we have only dedicated one or two classes to beginning the film-making process at Sultan Bazaar and Railway due to holidays and exams, but we are off to a great start. Stella and I have a solid plan for our language film which we started drafting with the girls and put the finishing touches on ourselves to show them the creative possibilities for their next film project. We plan to teach them how to incorporate some short stop-motion animation to spice up the ordinary voice-over–visuals – interview format. The small class-size and eagerness of the girls at Sultan Bazaar gives us confidence that they will be able to pull this off while sticking to our tight schedule.

At Railway all thirty girls have divided into teams of 4 -5 to take on different roles in the making of our film about Telangana. An interview team drafted questions and interviewed a couple teachers about their opinions and the impact of the political situation on their lives. The photo team searched for images from the web to help explain the Telangana issue to a foreign audience. A research team began reading articles and writing a voice-over introducing the issue. A video team searched Youtube for news clips that could be spliced together for an engaging intro that conveys the importance of the situation and pulls the audience in.

The last two teams are looking ahead to our final project where students will hopefully go through the process of identifying a community issue they would like to research and address by making a film and perhaps designing a community-action project to help solve the issue. All students wrote a newspaper article about a community problem and the remaining two teams are typing up the articles, formatting them into a newspaper and photographing the various issues. The majority of students seem to be concerned with water scarcity in their communities. I think that my next step will be to identify a local NGO working to help those who don’t have access to clean water to see if they would be open to speaking with the girls.

The team-work approach has worked well in helping to get a lot done at a quicker pace. My hope is to let the girls rotate through each team so they are exposed to each task and learn all the requisite skills to make a video. Hopefully all goes well this week and we make significant progress on the shooting and compilation of the footage. Wish us luck!