Beyond clickbait and commerce

Jocelyn E.
Williams
broadcasting values. Face TV is ‘your channel, your voice, your
community … your voice can be heard, your message understood …
[TV] made for you and by you’ (Face: Access TV for NZ, Sky Channel
083 2015). This opportunity led me to initial consultations with
Face and Unitec colleagues about how objectives of community
engagement, student learning, and impactful research relating to
co-creative media and community storytelling could be brought
together in a single venture. At the same time, community research
colleagues at Unitec were keen to use the opportunity to help their
community groups tell their stories.
Second, preparing graduates for evolving workplace practices,
especially collaboration in diverse teams working on real projects, is
held to be an institutional imperative at Unitec. Therefore, I sought
to knit together the disciplinary skills and perspectives of staff
and students from both Communication Studies (my discipline)
and Screen Arts 2 (also a specialist discipline at Unitec). This meant
that the direction and production expertise of Screen colleagues,
especially in documentary, would inform the project, as well as
providing opportunities for students in both disciplines to gain
experience in content production.
Third, the availability of a Screen expert in the project team, as well
as the fact that an important project objective was to maximise
learning value for students, had specific effects on the creation and
production process and the form that The living community takes.
In the early stages, I consulted closely with the Head of Performing
and Screen Arts at Unitec and very experienced documentary
expert Alexander Lee 3 who took the role of Executive Producer for
the series. We considered how best to involve students in as many
ways as we could to give them experience, such as in researching
for stories, developing scripts, being studio presenters, auditioning
and rehearsing for studio work, and much more. We planned a
standard half-hour format for each show (effectively about 23
minutes of content to fit Face TV scheduling) to achieve a series
look and feel that would be relatively straightforward to edit and
produce. This format consisted of an intro with graphics designed by
students, an opening studio segment featuring student presenters,
a community location piece of some length, and a final studio
wrap-up and ‘outro’. A Unitec Screen Arts colleague took the
role of Production Manager, and worked with students filming on
location. Post-production editing was done under the supervision of
an editing teacher. This close collaboration with Screen colleagues
also enabled the project to borrow equipment and post-production
facilities. Thus the screen industry/documentary perspective shaped
the operational detail of getting the series completed.
At another level, determining how to work with community
groups, students, researcher colleagues and screen experts to
facilitate the creation of stories that would honour community
50 Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016