By Nazreen Nizam and Seelan Palay

Alongside the communities, we also have advocacy workers and a group of citizen journalists from Citizen Journalists Malaysia (CJMY) who work in teams.

Our first session was on storytelling. The objective of this session was for the participants to get to know each other, share their stories and experiences and build up strong and significant storylines. The second session was on video advocacy. In this session, participants were introduced on how to develop plans for their videos to be better used for advocacy purposes.

After the initial sessions, we continued with the storyboarding session – in which the participants learned about visual framing and script development. The teams discussed on how to refine their story ideas and came up with their respective storyboards. They then presented their storyboards and finalized their storyboards based on feedback from the trainer and other participants.

The next session was on pre-filming, camera handling and an introduction to the shooting of footages. This was a more practical session as the participants were exposed to the basics of camera handling and the six basic types of shots. Following that, we had a video security and shooting session. In this session, we covered video security skills, advanced camera handling/care and the participants then produced their own short video clips with cut-aways.

The next two sessions were focused on video editing. In these sessions, the participants learnt about various editing techniques, transitions, and other audio, video and frame adjustments.

The last group session of the Crossroads project in Klang Valley was on video compression and distribution. Here, we covered video distribution techniques and introduced the theory, concepts and terms surrounding video compression. We also had a review of the first drafts of the videos produced by the teams.

We plan to have the final drafts of videos from Klang Valley ready by the third week of August. We are also now preparing to start a series of workshops for the project in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.