Neli, Johanna and Prudence planning the video during the workshop

From May to July 2012 Oxfam Australia and Jetty run a video workshop that me and some other staff members of WKU were invited to take part in. The aim of the workshop was to introduce basic video-making techniques to us and teach us how to film and edit our own videos.

Exploring the world of video, we learnt that the moving picture is a great way to tell your story. It is much easier to get someone’s attention by showing them a video instead of handing out a piece of paper. I think videos about what we do will help us to reach more members of the community, especially teenagers. During the workshop we learned to understand video structure. When making videos you do planning and you have to imagine the scenes even before you film them. At first, you have to decide what kind of video you would like to make, for example an awareness video or a marketing video. You have to ask yourself what you hope to achieve with the video and who will be your audience. Then, you have to decide who should be the main character of your story and you chose the location where the scene should take place. We decided to make a promotion video about our Life Skills Training and the Health Academy in Edendale and we want to show this video to the youth at schools to tell them about WKU.

Concerning the storyline, we learned that a video has three acts: At the beginning you tell where the story is set and what it is about. In the middle act we introduce the characters who then tell their story. All results in the end act where we tell our main message, that for us is ‘GET TESTED’.

Another session was all about filming: Type of shots, framing techniques, the golden rule, wide angle and close-ups and how to hold the camera without shaking your hands. We had a lot of fun filming at the Health Academy and around Edendale and we took some really nice shots.

After learning about editing a video we presented our first self-made video to Oxfam Australia and other organisations that also took part in the workshop. They loved it! Now, we will keep on taking shots and produce videos ourselves to show people what we do. And we will make our first marketing video even better by adding some more scenes.

I would like to thank Oxfam Australia, Jetty and team, Pumla and Nthateng for giving us this opportunity even though we encountered some problems during the process. We will use the tools we learnt to market WKU and our Health Academy and to raise awareness among the adolescents. Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues Johanna and Neli for the great team work. Keep it up!