Making a short film or video

Submitted by anna on Wed, 11/21/2007 - 13:02.

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Making a short film, or video needn't be expensive, nor require skills you thought the exclusive domain of professional media practitioners. It can almost always be guaranteed to be fun and you'll pick up skills and experience that are crucial for almost any type of activism today.

Read the Women's Resource Centre's story of resistance, and how they used film-making to support their work in their 'Why women?' campaign.

Over 100 women's rights activists gathered in Capetown, South Africa recently at the first 'Feminist tech exchange' (FTX).

Feminist tech exchange (FTX)

Video making was one of the five tracks, and you can take a look at some of the video's women made here.

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The following information is taken from the Tactical Tech 'NGO in a Box' series.

Tactical Tech is an international NGO working at the intersection of advocacy and technology. They use their technical expertise to increase the impact of campaigns in social justice and human rights.

Tactical Tech has produced four toolkits for NGOs called NGO in a Box. The NGO-in-a-box project is a series of innovative toolkits designed to meet the specialised technology needs of non-profit organisations such as NGOs, activists, independent journalists and community groups.

Each toolkit is a box containing:

* CDs containing specifically selected Free and Open Source Software
* easy-to-use tutorials
* hands-on guides
* informative case studies

The Audio/Video edition of NGO-in-a-Box

The AV edition is a toolkit for advocates, enabling them to harness multimedia as a tool for social change. Audio and Video are both extremely powerful communication means that can be used extensively for documenting and monitoring, campaigning, education, awareness raising and outreach. The Audio/Video edition aims to make it easier to access these tools and make effective use of them.

Produced by Tactical Tech in association with EngageMedia the Box contains a set of peer-reviewed Free and Open Source Software tools, with associated guides and tutorials. The toolkit is not aimed at experts, it aims to make these often complex tools accessible to a broader user base. The Audio/Video box can be accessed online but it's primary form is as a physical box set of CDs, providing immediate access to all the software tools without the need to download them.

The contents of the toolkit were selected by an editorial team made up media and technology activists consisting of people from Australia, Brazil, Croatia, the Netherlands, Serbia, the US and South Africa.

The edition covers the following areas

* Audio and video editing and production
* Streaming
* Audio and video players
* CD-DVD ripping and burning
* CD-DVD-VCD creation
* Online distribution - podcasting, vodcasting and web publishing
* Micro radio and TV
* Digital distribution strategies

Also included in the box is the multimedia Linux distribution Dyne:bolic and the TheOpenCD, a collective of open source programs for day to day activities.

Combined, these CDs provide a suite of free and open source software for multimedia production, distribution and collaboration.

The box can be viewed at av.ngoinabox.org

The campaign is organised by 'Take Back the Tech uk', a national initiative based on the APC WNSP international 'Take Back the Tech' campaign launched in 2006.

Take Back the Tech uk is organised by a group of women's rights activists from various UK organisations who are committed to ending violence against women, and in this campaign, are supporting and encouraging women to reclaim and use information and communication technologies (ICTs) in their work to stop violence against women.

*CopyLeft. 2006 APC Women's Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP)*

Permission is granted to use this document for personal use, for training and educational publications, and activities by peace, environmental, human rights or development organisations. Please provide an acknowledgement to APC WNSP.