What makes a youth-produced film good? The youth audience perspective

Abstract

In this article, we explore how youth audiences evaluate the quality of youth-produced films. Our interest stems from a dearth of ways to measure the quality of what youth produce in artistic production processes. As a result, making art in formal learning settings devolves into either romanticized creativity or instrumental work to improve skills in core content areas. We conducted focus groups with 38 youth participants where they viewed four different films produced by the same youth media arts organization that works with young people to produce short-form, autobiographical documentaries. We found that youth focused their evaluations on identifying the films' genre and content and on assessing how well the filmmakers' creative decisions fit with identifications of genre and content. Evaluations were mediated by audiences' expectations and seemed to inform judgments of quality and creativity. We hope that our work can inform the design of formal learning spaces where young people are producing narrative art.

Keywords:

• adolescents
• audience
• evaluation
• quality

Notes on contributors

Dr Erica Rosenfeld Halverson is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Literacy in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research focuses on how young people learn to produce art about the stories of their lives across a variety of artistic media and the role the production process plays in identity development and literacy learning. Dr Halverson has recently published in the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Teachers College Record and the Journal of Adolescent Research and was the 2010 recipient of the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies.

Dr Damiana Gibbons is an Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University in Media Studies in Curriculum and Instruction. She currently teaches courses in media literacy and production, in particular, Technology and Learning in a Digital Age, a course in how to teach media and technology in K-12 learning environments. Her research focuses on media production, identity, and media literacy practices with young people in order to understand the intersections of the visual, the spoken, the written, and the performed in youth video production. She has created an analytic methodology called multimodal microanalysis to understand the media products young people create, and she is currently working on developing the concept of rural media literacy.

Shelby Copeland is a media artist who aims to inform, teach, explore, delight, and inspire for various of institutions and venues. She is currently an undergraduate in Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is interested in visual literacy, visual culture, production, gear, imagination, inquiry, films, crafts, faith, identity, and design.

Alon Andrews is a Masters student in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works at the intersection of media production and research with young men who have been disenfranchised from mainstream institutions. Alon is a mentor, a student, a basketball coach, a writer, an artist, and a father.

Belen Hernando Llorens is a PhD student in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a 2012 recipient of the Social Science Research Council Fellowship in Gender Justice in the Era of Human Rights and the Tinker Nave Summer Fellowship in Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies.

Michelle B. Bass, PhD is a recent graduate of the Educational Psychology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she studied adolescent identity development, media literacy, and qualitative methodology. She is interested in studying identity development during the transition to college and first-year experience and how creating digital representations of self can foster the identity development of underrepresented students.

Notes

1. For more in-depth descriptions and to watch the films, visit: http://rw.fcny.org/rw/

2. At least one participant referred to DVDs as a type of film.