Role of film
Five Steps and ERA films Services
Education and training
Strategy
Filmed materials are a powerful and flexible tool for disseminating learning and training to a wide audience.
Key benefits:
•Reduces literacy barriers
•Can reach a wide, dispersed audience
•Visually demonstrates complex techniques
•Can be viewed collectively and repeatedly referenced
•Can both standardise learning and provide tailored learning
Research and evaluation
Pre-production
Production
Post-production
Communication
Robust evidence and analysis is the basis of successful policies and strategies for change. But the real value of research is in how it is used. A substantial amount of excellent research and analysis is useless because it is not accessible and is poorly communicated. It is vital to make research public and get it before target audiences.
Filmed research can make evidence more accessible and easier to share. Participatory Video research can also 'empower' local people and equip them with new skills and tools for self-mobilisation.
It can be usefully applied to:
•Generate rich, detailed and complex empirical data on micro-social processes
•Provide contextualised data and exploration of stated versus revealed preferences, attitudes and behaviours
•Document events
•Drive policy learning/transfer within and across organisations
•Monitor the progress of pilots
•Evaluations of existing activities (formative and summative)
•Evidence gathering for future activities
•Disseminate findings
Filmed research can make evidence harder to ignore and forms the basis of video-advocacy.
For an introduction to visual social research methods see ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Review Paper: Introducing Visual Methods (2008)
Advocacy and campaigns
Video-advocacy deepens and broadens the effectiveness of social research. It typically presents the evidence and analysis with key messages to an external audience.
It can be used to:
•Reach new, wider and dispersed audiences
•Give literal voice to marginalised people
•Counter stereotypes and generalisations
•Contextualise and personalise issues
•Capture subtleties and detail of lived realities
•Promote accountability
•Powerfully demonstrate impact
With a creative approach and policy-aware filmmakers, research footage can be produced, packaged and communicated in multiple formats, for multiple purposes and to multiple audiences.
•Oral testimony and personal stories
•Video evidence before a court, meeting or tribunal
•Video public service announcement or news release (VNR)
•Observational documentary (short and longer form)
•Source for news broadcast and archive footage
FAQs
ERA films for social change
