Yesterday was my second workshop with YHEP (Youth Health Empowerment Project). I was invited by Art Works!, a program of Mural Arts to facilitate video workshops at YHEP for the OUTspoken project. OUTspoken is a mutlimedia project which aims to create safe space for the voices of LGBTQ young people and their allies in Philadelphia.

The first week, we were a small group. We started out with a conversation about safe space- facilitated by the wonderful Flip and Rachel. These conversations will make there way into a larger video piece at the end of the project…. The idea of the MIM partnership was to do 2 workshops and guide participants through the making of their own 2 minute video piece- allowing them to voice something personal with regards to their relationship with YHEP and how they define safe space and why it’s important. The activities would also serve to create broll that could then also be woven into a larger video piece…

To get us talking. I started out by showing a video made by a previous participant from last summer, Nayelah. There is a moment in the video when she goes into a corner store and talked about how much she loves to cook… The group really responded to this– Normally when you see cooking on TV- it’s in a fancy kitchen or the Reading Terminal, they said… this was really real- and they could relate to cookin meals from the corner store offerings. It was great to see how one video was starting to inspire another…

Next, I showed Contra, which I really like- I think it’s a good way to show the power of images, and how emotions can be conveyed through metaphors and symbolism.

From there we did an image scavenger hunt and had a short moment at the end to start to record some personal narratives. Sam’s piece was filmmed that day. I used her video to start out the next class….

Tagged: Follow The Van!