Posts Tagged ‘heritage-making’
Su Yon’s Post Mortem #2 – rich storytelling resources from the community of Saturna Island
Posted by: suyon in Saturna Project on April 11th, 2009
Initially, Aerlyn and I planned to create three short videos for exploresaturna.com under the themes of 1) general introduction to the early Spanish exploration, 2) the East Point Fog Alarm Building, and 3) the Santa Saturnina.feral goats on Saturna Island
The core concept of our storytelling was to tell the stories from the past by relating them to the current community members’ perspectives and passions. We wanted to convey the message that “history does not have to live in the past” throughout our videos. This was why it was crucial to interview the residents of Saturna Island for the videos.
During our visit to Saturna Island, we filmed a Saturna Heritage Committee meeting, the tour of the East Point Fog Alarm Building led by the last East Point Lighthouse keeper Ian McNeil, and several actively-involved community members.
Once we returned to Vancouver with the precious footage from Saturna Island, we realized that there were too many interesting stories and we shouldn’t make just three videos. That was how seven, instead of three, videos came about exploring 1) vision of the Fog Alarm Building (FAB), 2) the Santa Saturnina and its on-going Spanish heritage on the Gulf Islands, 3) the FAB as an artistic inspiration, 4) renovating the FAB, 5) the East Point Lighthouse keepers, 6) early Spanish exploration on the Northwest Coast, and 7) Canadian-invented diaphone fog alarms. Not to mention that, if the time frame for our team was longer, we could’ve created more videos because of the abundance of stories from Saturna Island.
The community of Saturna Island is the owner of exploresaturna.com. I hope that the Saturna Islanders will continue to update the video storytelling contents and showcase their everyday “heritage-making” process to the rest of the world on a regular basis.
I dare to suggest that a video making class would be an exciting part of the curriculum for Saturna Ecological Education Centre (SEEC) where young students can learn about how to tell a story via video and produce videos about what is happening on Saturna Island.
