For many years, the Community Conservation Research Network (CCRN) has been engaged in local community-focused studies around the world. More and more, these studies are involving video production, often by researchers or by members of local communities who are working on activities involving environmental conservation and livelihood security. Many of these stories may be viewed elsewhere on the CCRN’s website. They are reaching more and more people, providing positive examples for communities engaged in shaping their own destinies.
While our work has focused on conservation and livelihoods, we see the broader need to support good video production, and storytelling, by all those engaged in community-focused and community-supporting research, whatever the topic. That reality has been the impetus for this learning resource – Documenting with Video – consisting of a manual and three videos.
We hope you will find many useful tips and a range of information here, but its single most important purpose is to support you in your storytelling efforts. The goal is to provide enough practical advice to help you get better results as a video story-teller, but to avoid giving too much information. The manual and the videos will help the researcher and/or the community, to tell their stories with more impact.
The focus is on three elements of video production; story, sound and video recording. All are covered in the manual, and each is the subject of one of the three videos. The manual and the videos do not need to be viewed together – they support but are independent of one another.
