Thursday 16 April 2015

PV, research and data

One of the aims of the pilot study was to explore the range of data that can be derived during a participatory video process.  While I'm becoming more interested in the visual and narrative analysis that can be done on the media that PV produces, my main interest is the opportunities to engage in research through the process side of PV - something I've been talking up for a while.  It's a been a great opportunity to play with this without the pressure of a full research project and to start to learn how to engage with people's world views while working with them on a film.

No pretty pictures for this post, but based on the experience, I'd suggest this (probably non-exhaustive) list of data types and opportunities one can expect from a PV process.  The ones in italics are ones we have examples of from this pilot, although without much analysis to date.  The rest are ones I think there is potential for.

Participant observation
  • Notes on facilitation
  • Autoethnography from participants
  • Behind the scenes filming of crew discussions
  • Screening observations
  • Notes on critical decision points
  • Walkabout observation
Interviews
  • On camera, participant led interviews
  • Vox pops
  • Behind the scenes interviews
  • Parallel semi-structured interviews with individuals
  • Parallel photo-elicitation
  • Parallel self-recorded interviews
  • Peer interviews from workshop exercises
  • Recorded group reflection and discussion
Documentary analysis
  • Production documents - scripts, workplans, storyboards, interview schedules etc.
  • Briefings
Visual/narrative analysis
  • Main film - discourse analysis, thematic analysis, micro-expressions, spatial relationships
  • Training exercises - ditto
  • Photos - ditto
  • Rushes - ditto
  • BTS scenes - ditto
Two particularly interesting observations come out of the project for me, when thinking of it as a methodological pilot.

- Spatial, visual and verbal data sometimes highlighted quite different things.  For example, we started work at each of the schools with a walkabout - an opportunity for the host teachers to show the visiting teachers and ourselves around.  I took notes on what the group seemed most interested in.  At both schools there was little obvious interest in classrooms, and instead lot of attention to the schools as places to live and work the land, with some later interest in facilities and their relationship to donors and partners.  Verbal data in relation to this threw up spatial comparisons too, but much more related to teaching practice - noting how school gardens are laid out, and shopping corners inside classrooms. It could relate to the difference between observing what a group does (coarse grained), and what individuals pick up on (harder to do by pure observation).
- There was a very neat demonstration of the differences in the theory-in-practice of pedagogy at the local heuristic level, compared to external and more formal conceptions of it.  One of the key themes in the film was active learning, which our in-team educational experts related to particular mode of working with learners in class (for example, setting tasks for groups to work out rather than individualised rote learning).  Our teacher participants included this in their description of active learning, but drew the boundary much more widely to include sports, the school feeding programme, community relations, and so on.  At one stage it felt like it covered everything and was fairly naive and meaningless.  However, following it up I'd say that it's a robust conceptual structure (there's a good internal logic, and it was consistent across both schools even though they've little to do with one another), it's at the core of these teacher's practice and values, and it's much richer than the formal theoretical notion.  It seems to relate to an holistic idea of learners and creating the best environment for them to take active part in learning.  This covers things like engaging their interest and incentivising their participation in school, as well as working with the community to provide a good social context for education.  It's practical and relates directly to retention and completion.  I'm hoping to get a chance to build some cognitive maps from the interview data to be in a better position to describe it.

Wednesday 8 April 2015

Prosumer gear

As well as the tablet kit for our project in Malawi, we brought a high-end set of gear to work with and to compare in how it's used. It was basically Rick Goldsmith's core film-making kit at the moment (built around a decent camcorder) and supplemented with some of my Open University gear.  It's just possible to film solo with this setup, but that's not really the point - it allows a crew to work together to capture high quality sound and video, with a lot of control over the recording settings.


The kit, consists of:
  • Panasonic AF101
  • Lenses (a decent zoom and some fast primes)
  • Monitor
  • Tripod
  • Shotgun Mic
  • Rode windshield suspension kit
  • Headphones
  • Boom pole.
  • Projection gear
  • Large reflector
  • LED light and stand
Mac laptop set up as an edit deck with 
  • Final Cut Pro 7
  • iMovie

Although our participants needed quite a lot of hands-on support to get going with this setup, it's not quite true that it's harder to use for newcomers to film-making.  Most people can pick up an ipad and start shooting and get something straight away. But once the idea that the idea of control over the camera to get an intentional shot is introduced then it's a less straight-forward comparison.  Having a large, robust rig with more physical controls provides a good opportunity to work with things like focus, exposure and white balance, which even if they're available on smaller devices are often hidden behind touchscreen menu options.  In a sense the equipment itself motivates a more considered approach to shooting and with enthusiasm and appropriate support it can work very well for a group.  It also encourages teamworking, with space for several people collaborate in getting a shot.


The advantages:
  • It's a large, robust setup that enables collaborative film-making.  It works well with groups up to 10 or so if some are being interviewed while others are crewing.
  • The video monitor and headphones help pick up recording issues on the shoot and correct for them, while high recording quality (ie definition and codecs) keep options open in the edit.  We felt this was important for a project which is producing advocacy material for international use.
  • Setting up shots gave our group a lot of time to discuss the content of interviews and coach on and negotiate about what was going to be said next.
  • Options like different lenses, reflectors and lighting and  
  • Several of the teachers we were working with took very naturally to working with this kit, and they could easily form the nucleus of a film-making team in the future.
Issues we've run into
  • The gear is expensive and we couldn't get it insured to be loaned out in the way that the ipad based kits were.
  • Weight - moving all this kit around locally and internationally is a serious undertaking.
  • Shots take time, which means that there needs to be a lot of time available, or that production planning needs to be tight.
  • The complexity of the options available for shooting means that it takes time to get used to using.  It can also be intimidating for participatns to get going.
Conclusions
Higher end kit can have a place in participatory film-making and opens doors for creativity and finer control of outcomes.  It forces more planning and thinking through how things are going to look, but this pays off in the edit. A nice progression was getting participants interested in thinking about film-making and expressing their own ideas with the tablet based kit, and then working together as a group using this gear.  In the end a lot comes out of the particular interests of the participants themselves.