Very Stretchy Indeed

This week “Overtown Inside Out” shifted in to high gear. I designed the sixteen-week multimedia project not only to document contemporary life in Overtown, but also to test the viability of a completely new method for disseminating hyperlocal journalism to communities with limited Internet access. On Friday funding came though for the multimedia kiosks that will deliver to the people of Overtown the films I make about the people of Overtown.

Overtown is one of Miami’s poorest neighborhoods. The project is built upon a foundational series of three short films, each one to four minutes long, that I shot in there in late 2009 and early 2010. These introductory films – “This is Overtown” (2009), The Eye of Overtown (2009), and “Bullets Don’t Have Eyes” (2010) – are the first three chapters of what will be a twelve to sixteen chapter documentary about life in Overtown, told from the perspective of the people who live there.

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In one of my Master’s in Multimedia Journalism graduate classes at the University of Miami’s School of Communication, we have recently been discussing the relationship between a documentary photographer and his/her subjects – Is the proper, ethical relationship strictly professional, or can an ethical photographer/subject relationship include or evolve into something that is a more nebulous amalgamation of the professional and the personal – a friendship based on a professional relationship – as a result of the necessarily intimate and confessional nature of the interaction?

In no way do I claim any greater insight on this long standing and complex discussion than the next guy or gal with a camera strung around his/her neck, but having worked as a professional photographer for 25 years and during that time photographed “people in their environments” literally throughout “North America and the entire world,” (that’s 50 countries and 38 states thus far) I have the experience of countless photographer/subject relationships to draw upon as I consider the issue.

One of these relationships came to mind during class last week, and I would like to share it here, along with two edits of the one-minute film that was born of that relationship.

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Again using Canon’s 5D Mark ii and the Zoom H4n audio recorder, I shot and produced the video above for Rich Beckman’s Multimedia Storytelling graduate seminar at the University of Miami School of Communication. The assignment was to create a 30 second public service announcement promoting Special Olympics. I decided to produce a spot for Special Olympics’ “Spread the Word to End the Word” campaign, an effort designed to encourage people to stop using the words “retarded” or “retard” to describe individuals with intellectual disabilities.

My concept was to show a series of video clips of things that begin with the letter “R,” and to end with a clip of a Special Olympian followed by the words “Role Model.” I decided to test the concept’s potential by blogging stills and video clips as the shoot progressed, and asking people to “Name That Project.”

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(Photographs above by Paula Echevarria: pechez@gmail.com)

If you are a still photographer, you’re probably moving toward incorporating motion into your arsenal of marketable skills.  If you’re a videographer, you’re probably exploring the myriad possibilities opened up to you by the new 35mm DSLR video-capable cameras from Canon and Nikon.

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