Post-Travel Classes: Editing, Narrating, etc.

The travel portion of the 2012 Navajo Oral History project is is done for the summer.  The student journalism teams made up of students from Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona, and Winona State University of Winona, Minnesota, spent 2.5 weeks on the Navajo Nation interviewing Navajo elders, and learning something of the culture and history of the reservation.  Last week, the WSU students returned to Minnesota with hours of digital video and audio and thousands of digital photographs.

Now the real work begins, as the teams meet via Interactive Television, email, Facebook and other electronic means to help each other sift through all the material with the ultimate goal of building a factual, interesting and historically significant documentary film about their Navajo elder.

This is hard work.  The groups have spent dozens of hours transcribing all the text of their interviews.  Now, they are going over those transcripts repeatedly to find the best quotes to include in their films.

The groups are meeting via ITV this week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

  

 

 

By Friday, each group will have a close to final draft version of their film.  Next week, they'll meet with the faculty members of the class to make final edits and clean up little odds and ends in the editing process.

By the end of July, the DVDs will be finalized and copies ordered, so they can be here in time for the reception and premier events that will happen in September.

If you are a family member or friend of any of the students involved in this project, please make it a point to come to the receptions and see the films.  These are important events to celebrate the hard work, but also to congratulate the students for making lasting, meaningful documentary films.