ImMEDIAte Justice Workshops
Week 1 of our 8 week summer film-making program was too much fun! There was a lot of buzz and excitement after such an awesome retreat, it was great to be reunited again! Each week throughout the program, mentees learn a film-making technique as they analyze the society they live in. Week one got everyone thinking about their personal experiences and encounters with gender. Defining gender is not easy to do in a day, but our fearless mentors led a three part workshop that got everyone to think about the spectrum of gender. Mentors and mentees discussed what gender meant to them and collaboratively came to conclusions about how society defines gender.
Mentors discussed the gender binary that western society upholds. Behaviors, ways of dress, and language are categorized into two rigid categories of gender. From their discussions, mentors and mentees collaborated to fill in gender boxes with societal expectations and norms.
One of the workshops everyone took part in was the Wall-to-Wall exercise. This was an interactive exercise that got everyone out of their seats and to think about their experiences with gender. Mentors and mentees were given statements that they either agreed strongly with, felt neutral about, or disagreed with. This exercise was great because everyone defied the boxes we had just defined. Mentors and mentees got to see the ways in which we move through the spectrum.
The second half of the day was an introduction to pixilation animation! IMJ mentor Laura Yilmaz introduced the youth to Dragon Stop Motion animation software. Mentees watched a variety of videos that showed how stop motion animation looks in a final product. The videos showed the advantages to using this filming technique, there are so many ways to tell a story using this technique. One particular video I enjoyed was this music video by Ok Go which was shot in Los Angeles!
*This blog post was brought to you by ImMEDIAte Justice mentor/social media queen, Retro!
*For more photos of our program, be sure to check out our Facebook fan page!
