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Communities in Peril (a.k.a. I decided on my project--finally!)

elisabethdeklee
Explorer
Without a doubt, the most challenging part of LaunchPad so far has been deciding on my project. In my application, I created a list of about half-a-dozen ideas that piqued my interest. I figured that by the end of the LaunchPad weekend, I'd be able to pare that down to just a couple contenders. Instead, the opposite happened. After brainstorming with you all, I had twice as many ideas as I started with. So I put together a list of considerations to help with the decision-making process:

1. Feasibility, given my resources, time, and skills
2. Subject matter expertise (just because it's a good idea, doesn't mean I'm the best person to do it)
3. Episodic quality
4. Social good
5. Fun factor (sure, it's a good idea, but will I enjoy working on it?)

As I started to think about it, I realized that one thread that ran through all my ideas was 'community.' Over the years, I've lived in many alternative spaces, intentional communities, and co-ops and have seen firsthand how happy and productive people can be when they have a supportive group to fall back on. On the flip side, I've also observed how vulnerable communities and community spaces can be to external threats like globalization, urbanization, and other political influences in a world that caters to the individual and the nuclear family unit.

So my project is to create a series of interactive 360 videos that document communities in peril and the ephemeral spaces they inhabit. In an ever-changing, interconnected world, we often have only a very short window to capture the transition... before they disappear entirely. 

An example of a community in peril is Xian Village, an urban village in Guangzhou, China, that I visited back in 2015 and that is in jeopardy as the result of urbanization. To prevent developers from razing their village to the ground and building high rises, the villagers protested and began squatting in the half-demolished rubble of their old homes and ancestral spaces. Over the years, the community has become more unified than ever and is still standing strong against the developers, in spite of the constant threat of destruction. 
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Xian Village came to mind first, because I've been there and know people with connections to the villagers, but the list is endless. There are many reasons a community could be in jeopardy—gentrification, globalization, as the result of war, by design, etc—and all are on the table. 

The goal of the project is to document, not just the space, but the way it's used by the community. To achieve this, I will be using scanners graciously donated by some friends at Matterport (https://matterport.com/) to document the layout of the environment in a way that allows viewers to walk around in it and explore. Embedded in the layout will be 360 videos that offer a snapshot into how the space is actually used. For example, an ancestral shrine may contain a graphical link to an interview about how the shrine is used or footage of a ritual.

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My schedule is a bit nebulous at the moment, as I work around my day job, but the general timeframe is as follows:

July: Research! Create a list of communities in peril and pick the the most viable one for the LaunchPad pitch (knowing that we can get others later). Get to know the community (if I do not already). Acquire cameras and other production tools.
Early August: Filming!
Late August - early September: Stitching and editing a short promo to demonstrate the concept.

Coincidentally, I just stumbled across this CNN article announcing that Mark Zuckerberg has updated Facebook’s mission statement to emphasize community (above and beyond 'friendship'): “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." 






2 REPLIES 2

elisabethdeklee
Explorer
Gosh, sorry. Didn't mean to submit my weekly blog as it's own discussion thread. If someone figures out how to delete it, let me know. I've already posted it again in the proper place (as a comment in the main thread).

sberky
Protege
Love this idea, very cool!