Month: April 2020

  Making our rough cut of the call to action video was very challenging as the media industry in those remote areas still is very scarce, so we didn’t have much online content to work with, but our main idea was enhancing the agencies in the key actions, empower women’s voices, create a positive change in social attitudes, increasing economic opportunities for women and reducing domestic violence.
I was responsible for shaping the rough cut of pacific island women inspired in the movie Vai and in our experiment we tried to use voices whispering and along getting louder showing those voices together have power. We wanted real voices of those women speaking in their native language, so I went after and emailed all the development agencies and websites we found in our research and on Facebook pages. The Pacific Women’s Network replied asking for the link of a post so they could share on their page, which I did and also asked friends to share the post, but unfortunately, I didn’t have replies. My group and I did a meeting to discuss alternatives for changing our approach and they suggested looking for a different quote and use the voices of the movie ‘Vai’. I kept my research and found a space on the website of Pacific Women encouraging share powerful quotes of pacific island women in high positions, such as parliament member and prime minister.
From the experiment, I kept the ocean, changing from dark to lighter and wider colour as a way to enlight and empower the women wishes, and the sound of waves as a symbolism of water (Vai in many pacific languages), and the graphic effects to follow the movement of the water. I tried to mix the Vai dialogues with the quotes, but it got so much information, that the quotes lost their impact, so we just kept the quotations.
I can say that the most valuable lesson from human rights filmmaking is keeping the most truthful as possible to deliver a clear message, especially if you are not apt or haven’t experience or background to talk for those voices, as most of the content talk about delicate situations, you have to be careful how you express the message.

When my group and I decided how our call to action videos would look like, we thought in using main elements that remind us of the movies. Vai, as the name meaning in many pacific islanders’ languages is water, remind us of the ocean and we can see the element very present in the movie. For our main video we thought in using the voices of natives from the islands speaking in their own language focusing in representation, but in the experiment, we used our own voices recorded and translated the meaning of what the pacific island women are fighting for. Maori, Filipino, French, and English are some of the national spoken languages in the region and because the main project would be easier to find people, we translated the voices messages in those written languages. The colours of the water changing were also the result of experimenting different presets that could show the whisper getting stronger and clear, listened, the ocean follow that pattern, from dark to lighter and wider colour. To show the pacific island women empowerment we decided to change the text as ‘we’ want to be heard instead of the original idea ‘I’. Vai has an abstract style of showing the problems indigenous women suffer in the islands so we tried to follow the same line.

For Not Just numbers, we considered using an Indigenous woman sitting alone with a spotlight focusing on her, but we talked about adapting and using an empty chair in a way of representing the women’s lives lost because of domestic violence. Voices speaking in the background shows they were not forgotten and to represent the support of indigenous women after the group. We also thought about using orange and brown colours pallet to associate with the documentary and focus more on the sounds and voices to create empathy in the audience. We aimed for a melancholic mood.

I believe emphasizing the sound was a good strategy for us, not just due to mobility issues we are facing in this pandemic situation, but also if we think about our aims, stop the culture of abuse and looking for equal rights, voices speaking makes the audience closer to understand and share the feelings to another rather than having faces in the whole video. I thought I was going to struggle much more than it actually happened. It was a good exercise to learn more about what Premiere Pro tools.