The Final Projects Screening was the last class of our workshop, after several weeks of working real hard; we watched the video pieces created by the participants. As people arrived and we were getting ready, we had a conversation about the workshop experiences. People shared their expectations before starting and how the class revealed for them as a place for connection, growth and sometimes challenge.

The first part of the screening included the Collective Stories, in which participants took a trip to Roosevelt Island as a departing point to create a narrative exercise that included thinking individually, writing in teams and then developing a photo/text/video piece. It was very interesting to see how the projects were woven together, from different pieces stitched together, to projects with pieces that worked as a shell for containing the other videos.

In the Replication Exercises, people took some scenes lasting a couple minutes from movies and reshoot them. It is an exercise with the goal of realizing how complex the mix of technical, and artistic decisions that appear on screen can be. It was very nice to discover a lot of acting talent in the NNY. From the initial laughter of watching your teammate on a big screen, we just went to dead silence as the intensity and good performing of the participants’ trapped the viewers. Maybe there should be an acting NNY workshop too.

The Personal Initiatives, as we called them, were ideas that the participants worked on their own and by their own will. A mix of documentary, slideshow, GIFs and class documentation was presented. It was a very fresh view that started with the idea of asking the participants to register in any way they wanted each class of the workshop.

As the screening wrapped up, we had a final discussion. We talked about the technical challenges and how people had to overcome challenges that ranged from busy schedules to language. Some groups had a nice result when it came to working together, regardless of all the age and culture differences. As always, “If we would have had more time, we should have done this…” came up as the wish list for all this video projects; not a big deal, because the workshop was planned as a process-oriented collective collaboration. We closed the workshop with a reception and of course, there were several cameras, documenting the final chapter for Collective Storytelling.

Images by Judy Chu