Participatory video (PV) is a form of participatory media in which a group or community creates their own film. The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories. It is therefore primarily about process, though high quality and accessible films (products) can be created using these methods if that is a desired outcome. This process can be very empowering, enabling a group or community to take their own action to solve their own problems, and also to communicate their needs and ideas to decision-makers and/or other groups and communities. As such, PV can be a highly effective tool to engage and mobilise marginalised people, and to help them to implement their own forms of sustainable development based on local needs.
Whilst there are forms of documentary filmmaking that are able to sensitively represent the realities of their subjects' lives and even to voice their concerns, documentary films very much remain the authored products of a documentary filmmaker. As such, the subjects of documentaries rarely have any say (or sometimes have some limited say) in how they will ultimately be represented. By contrast, in PV the subjects make their own film in which they can shape issues according to their own sense of what is important, and they can also control how they will be represented. Additionally, documentary films are often expected to meet stringent aesthetic standards and are usually made with a large audience in mind. The PV process, on the other hand, is less concerned with appearance than with content, and the films are usually made with particular audiences and objectives in mind.
The first experiments in PV were the work of Don Snowden, a Canadian who pioneered the idea of using media to enable a people-centered community development approach. Then Director of the Extension Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Snowden worked with filmmaker Colin Low and the National Film Board of Canada's Challenge for Change program to apply his ideas in Fogo Island, Newfoundland, a small fishing community.[2] By watching each other’s films, the different villagers on the island came to realise that they shared many of the same problems and that by working together they could solve some of them. the films were also shown to politicians who lived too far away and were too busy to actually visit the island. As a result of this dialogue, government policies and actions were changed. The techniques developed by Snowden became known as the Fogo process.[3] Snowden went on to apply the Fogo process all over the world until his death in India in 1984.
The first community-made video in Canada was the 1969 Challenge for Change video VTR St-Jacques, filmed in a poor Montreal neighbourhood.[4] In order to make VTR St-Jacques, directors Dorothy Henault and Bonnie Sherr Klein trained community members in video to represent their struggle for affordable and accessible medical care. VTR St-Jacques was shown across Canada and the U.S., inspiring other projects.[2]
There has been no uniform movement to promote and practise PV but different individuals and groups have set up pockets of PV work, usually molding it to their particular needs and situations. PV has also grown with the increasing accessibility of home video equipment.
An early and significant book on participatory video was published in the UK in 1997 by Clive Robertson and Jackie Shaw, Directors of Real Time Video, and has informed many subsequent books and articles, including the book this article has drawn from. Real Time are an educational charity that pioneered many of the techniques and methodologies still used today, and have been working in the participatory video field since 1984.
In combination with other methodologies such as Participatory Learning in Action (PLA) techniques, Participatory Rural Appraisal and others. PV has been successfully applied to projects focussing on; community development; promoting local innovation and endogenous development; therapeutic work; a voice for marginalised groups; a catalyst for community-led action; a tool for communicating with policy makers; a means of involving users in their own research for example action research, participatory research, user-led research; also for programme monitoring and evaluation or Social impact assessment...new possible applications are being continually developed.
White, S. (2003) (ed.) Participatory Video: Images that transform and Empower (London, Sage)