FILMMAKING WORKSHOP DURING THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC: THE NUFF 2020 ONLINE WORKSHOP
AUTHOR: MARION BOUVIER – TVIBIT
NUFF is a film festival for young people which takes place every year in Tromsø, northern Norway. There are two parts to the festival: a six-day workshop during which around 40 young filmmakers create a film from idea to finish with assistance from mentors, followed by the actual film festival that shows films made by young people aged 13 to 26. For the past 17 years, the workshop participants travelled from all over the world to Tromsø and stayed on location for a week to make their films. In 2020, however, the pandemic changed everything and NUFF went online for the most part.
The goal of the workshop is to give participants direct experience of filmmaking with a small team of peers, to learn practical skills, and to develop their creative talents. To make the workshop happen online instead of in person, we used five digital tools: Discord ( k p. 32), Mozilla Hubs ( k p. 31), Facebook ( k p. 55), Zoom ( k p. 31), und Vimeo livestreaming ( k p. 52). By far the most commonly used digital tool was Dis - cord, which allowed workshop participants to commu - nicate regularly during the whole week. They used the text chat function as well as voice and video chat, and to a lesser extent the filesharing function. We created a NUFF Discord server for the workshop, which con - sisted of several “channels”:
In addition, NUFF staff had access to all channels, including those for workshop participants and men- tors, so they could check in on everyone and provide help whenever needed. Each workshop group func- tioned differently – some chatted on Discord daily using both voice and video chat and text, while others met less frequently and worked more independent- ly of each other. Overall, most participants found Discord easy to use: some of them had already used it before, others got the hang of it quite quickly. The main advantages of Discord are that it offers a lot of freedom (the ability to jump in and out of a text chat or a voice or video meeting without having to sched- ule a meeting in advance), is entirely free to use for participants, and is user-friendly. The main downside of using Discord, compared to in-person workshops, is that is more difficult to follow up on participants’ progress. A few participants also quit the workshop right after the introduction meeting on Zoom, which of course would not have been the case had they trav- elled to Tromsø and been with the group. In short, it is harder to maintain motivation and drive when participants are sitting alone in front of their comput- er or smartphones.
» A general channel with a helpdesk, providing an - nouncements and general information
» A channel for each group and their respective mentor
» A private channel for mentors
» A space just for NUFF staff.
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Contributions from practitioners
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