Miriam: It was a one-day workshop, so if it was a longer workshop, or had you spent more time in the curriculum development phase with a coordinator, would that have allowed you to have more say-so in what you needed in order to produce what you expected to see?

Kate:

I think the Sense project organizer was very adamant about saying it was a student project and to let them do whatever they want. What they wanted to do was sit in a circle and talk about sex. I’ve seen videos like that and I thought it’s not going to come across well. It’s going to be fairly typical, and I thought we could do something more. I asked the project manager if we could do that – I told her my idea, which was to do a talk show, and she said that’s great, and go for it.

From there, I developed the idea myself. I talked to the students the day of, and they said that was a really good idea, and all got into character. As I’d spoken to them previously and said what I wanted to do, I had to have a creative vision in my head in order to go about filming and setting it up. I think that in the end, we made a film that reflected the idea of a talk show, rather than the student’s involvement in a film.

Miriam: Can we talk a bit about motivation? I mean, I think part of the facilitator, what you’re feeding off is student motivation.

Kate:

It’s interesting, because the first project we did was with 14-15 year olds, and they were very motivated behind the camera and doing a lot of work like that. With the sense project, they were 17-18 year olds, and they were a lot less motivated to take action. They were obviously motivated as volunteers of the Sense project, they wanted to go and educate their peers and they were a really involved and intelligent group of people. They weren’t a group who were coming to make a video because they were interested in video. This was just a part of their project. It didn’t have the same interests as someone who wants to be a video maker coming in and making a video. I think in that sense, it was hard to motivate other aspects of filmmaking, besides being an actor.

Miriam: What would you say in future if you were going to do another workshop, and there was a group that was working with the community center and your job is to facilitate them making a video? What would you do to make sure the video part didn’t get turned into, “that’s Kate’s thing”?

Kate:

I think I would insist that they took turns filming and directing, even if they didn’t express an interest in that. I didn’t feel it was really my place to push them to do things, but at the same time I had to take up the slack of that. It became clear that it wasn’t my position either to take the artistic role. It was fairly ambiguous, but in the future, I would definitely insist that they take turns. You don’t know you don’t enjoy it until you’ve tried it, and I think that would give them more.

Miriam: So you’d work like a velvet glove cast in iron kind of thing? Like, I’ll force you to do the fun stuff?

Kate:

Well, I don’t want to force anybody to do anything, so to speak, btu I think I’d insist a little bit – “Try and hold the camera, here’s the zoom, set up your shot, what does it look like?” – they’d have become much more interested in it, and they would have probably acted a little bit differently in front of the camera, because they’d have seen what it’s like behind the camera. Given more of a push, they’d have found the enthusiasm.