Brave New Voices: Part 2
CLIENT: City of GreshamPROJECT: Brave New Voices is an Emmy-nominated two part series exploring the stories, perspectives and experiences of immigrants who have settled in East County outside of Portland, Oregon. Meet the Brave New Voices of: a young Christian woman from the Middle East, a professionally trained dancer from Zimbabwe, and a career driven family gal from Mexico. The Brave New Voices concept is an original MetroEast production that we funded through the Gresham Art and Cultural Assistance Grant.
APPROACH: Our biggest challenge for the second Brave New Voices video was finding participants who were willing to be on camera. Thankfully, MetroEast is deeply involved in our community through our media classes and offering our gear and studio to community producers. This is what eventually helped us recruit participants. Loveness, one of the subjects actually has her own show on our channels! When creating the aesthetic for our interviews, we placed our second camera on a slider that would capture a moving profile shot of the interviewees. We found that these shots cut together really nicely because the motion of the camera would flow from one woman to another enforcing one of the main themes of Brave New Voices which is how there are universal truths of being an immigrant in America. The faces of the interviewees flow together and at some points almost become interchangeable even though they all come from vastly different countries. We were lucky enough to get supplementary footage from our participants (photos and video) so viewers could get a better look into the backgrounds of the three women that were being spotlighted. RESULTS: This video earned MetroEast’s very first Emmy nomination and won a national Hometown Media Award! It also went on to screen at local film festivals in Portland.