There was enough food for thought as the Oorvani Foundation conducted a multi-media journalism workshop for the Vyasai Thozhargal community group on July 13th and 14th in Chennai.
Vyasai Thozhargal is a team of first-generation graduates, who have used education as a tool to fight the generational stigma stuck with their locality — Vyasarpadi. The youngsters run a tuition centre for the children of the neighbourhood, to ensure they do not drop out of school and fall into any form of addiction.
The two-day workshop at their tuition centre in Vyasarpadi, helped participants understand the need to speak up and share their own stories, exploring different multi-media formats to communicate. Around 19 youth between the ages of 19 and 30 years were part of the workshop. The sessions focused on media literacy, the basics of storytelling, writing a pitch, and using smartphones and multimedia tools to enhance storytelling. Participants learnt how to tell compelling stories from their immediate neighbourhood and society at large.
The facilitators — Meera K (Trustee, Oorvani Foundation), K C Vijaya Kumar and Sivasubramanyan M V — made the workshop interesting through their informative sessions interspersed with examples and activities. Sivasubramanyan M V is a freelance photographer and visual artist. KC Vijaya Kumar is the National Sports Editor of The Hindu with over 26 years of experience.
What the participants learnt
On the first day, the participants were divided into five groups and given activities like making their newspaper — Vyasai Times, and figuring out the news they found impactful from the recent newspapers. Sahana Charan (Chapter Editor, Citizen Matters) and Savitha Ganesh (Community Engagement Associate) also guided the teams during the activities. Following this, Vijay conducted a session on storytelling in which he covered the fundamental elements and structure of a story, citing interesting examples from sports and life.
This was followed by Siva’s session on multimedia storytelling in which he discussed the language of visual storytelling that includes concepts like light, stabilising mobile phones, frame composition and so on.
Meera then gave the participants an activity to write a pitch. By the end of day one, each team was ready with their pitches. Of the five teams, four teams chose to produce video stories, while one team decided to work on an article. The team left to gather information, and shoot photos and videos, as per their pitch for the rest of the evening.
On day two, the teams came with their raw footage and other inputs that they had gathered. Siva then conducted a session on editing and sequencing the clips and suggested other visual elements that could be included for storytelling using mobile phones. The team that chose to write an article was guided by Shobana Radhakrishnan (Senior Reporter, Citizen Matters) to convert the audio interviews into an article.
At the end of the workshop, the teams showcased their edited videos and the facilitators shared their reviews. There were interesting stories of resilience, government apathy, lack of sports education, the struggles of women in the neighbourhood, housing and livelihood that came out at the culmination of the workshop.
Abdul, one of the participants, said, “I first thought that these people would give boring lectures and go. But the sessions were designed in a very interesting and interactive way that I learned a lot about using different formats like videos, photos, and text.”
By Shobana Radhakrishnan