Inside Girl Tech Collective
By Monica Braine
It was another long editing session. The Girl Tech participant I had been working with slowly took off the black noise cancelling headphones she was wearing.
“This was hard.” she told me.
“What part?” I asked, thinking that I hadn’t shown her how to edit sound the right way, and perhaps she was struggling as a result.
“Listening to my mom over and over again,” she said. The story she collected was an interview with her mother that was long and sometimes filled with emotion. It was a difficult story and it needed to be edited from 17 minutes to five for the Girl Tech screening.
Girl Tech is a year-long Media Literacy Project (MLP) program in which young women ages 14 - 24 learn how to tell their reproductive justice stories using video. As MLP’s Media Production Coordinator, I have the opportunity to work with them as they take the journey of filmmaking.
After listening to the story together several times, we discussed the parts that might be edited out, and I showed her how to use the editing program to remove the audio. She sat at the computer for almost two hours, moving the play head back and forth inch by inch, cutting out the smallest details from pauses to longer periods of crying and her mother asking for moments of reprieve.
“It will be difficult to listen to her story over and over again.” I said. “It might bring up some strong feelings later. I know when I have worked on difficult things in the past, I have to take some time to take care of myself after editing.”
She asked me to explain.
I told her that when we listen to difficult or painful stories over and over it can trigger feelings inside of us, and we might need to do things to take care of ourselves.
“I try to do healthy things like take a walk, or knit, but a lot of times I will just watch a bunch of TV which I personally don’t think is that healthy,” I said.
She gave me the “you are ridiculous look” and smiled. She once told me that I was “random.” I told her “if by random you mean awesome, then yes, I am random.” I could see that this project would be more than sharing proper editing techniques and collecting good sound.
As I headed for home, I reflected on my own video project 10 years ago. I remember pushing myself to finish it in time for college graduation, sitting at my computer, eyes glazed over from hours staring at the screen. I, too, had to edit an interview with my mother, in which we discussed a painful chapter in my childhood. I finished my video on time, graduated and showed it at several film festivals. Still, to this day, when I screen the film, it is difficult to watch it. I worried about the young woman I was supporting. I worried that this project was too big, had too many parts, that my words were too “random.” The next time I saw this young woman, she had notes with her, and several new ideas. She seemed ready to challenge the daunting task ahead. We opened her program and began.
Telling difficult stories is the heart of media justice. All of the Girl Tech Collective stories challenge traditional ideas of history, culture, privilege and power. The stories range from profiles of community organizations that engage in reproductive justice work to biopics of teen parents. This year’s batch of homegrown media also included insightful analysis on sexual education in our schools, from those most impacted by the lack of it. Each one of these videos can become an agent for social change, and now each of these young women recognize their power to create that change.
Monica Braine is the Media Production Coordinator at Media Literacy Project
View the 2011 Girl Tech Collective Short Films
