Documentary Activism and Empathy Task
You have the choice of two tasks for this challenge and the next two weeks to do it:
1. Telling a Positive Story
For this project you should produce a short 2-3 minute documentary piece about a person, project or organisation that is making a positive change. This could be a person in your local community who has done something remarkable (such as a community initiative), a student campaign, a social enterprise, a charity in your local area, an initiative that is making a positive impact on you, a march or demonstration that you support, an event, or even a national or international campaign that you feel that you could help with your time.
What is important is that you should use your time to help promote a person, initiative, organisation or campaign that you believe is acting in a positive way. Ideally this should be an organisation who does not normally have the capabilities to make a film and promote themselves.
You should aim to get an interview with at least one person, or someone from the organisation, to tell their story in a positive way. You should consider the following questions that will give a structure to your film:
- What is the project, person or organisation?
- What have they done to make a positive change? What issue have they solved/are helping to solve?
- What help do they need
2. Empathy Project- Putting Yourself in Someone Elses Shoes
Using yourself as the subject for a short documentary, based on the ideas that you developed in the Week 4 Empathy Workshop, produce a short documentary piece where you do one of the following:
- Experience a subject position that is different to your own. You should aim to experience this for an extended period of time- so that you can give an insight into what it is like in someone elses shoes. (so for example could you go for a whole day without being able to see, without being able to hear, without the ability to walk)
- Try and live with without something that other people don’t have (such as the internet, money, clean water, facebook, supermarkets) for an extended period of time. Document your thoughts and feelings throughout this time.
- Or perhaps you can think of another, or a better, way to put yourself in someone elses to create empathy for your cause. Feel free to experiment with this task.