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

• In Event: Digital Media Arts: Learning, Assessment, and Design

Abstract

For too long, artistic production processes have lived in a pedagogical no man’s land. On the one hand, we have romanticized creativity to the point where we no longer feel as if we can judge the quality of youth produced art, lest we judge the young people themselves (Sefton-Green, 2000). Additionally, formal schooling is so constrained by testing and accountability that any content or skills that are not seen as directly contributing to students’ improvement in tested areas are considered extraneous and frivolous. One of the reasons, we believe, that the arts have not made more headway into the official curriculum is that we lack ways to measure the quality of what youth produce in artistic production processes. Without quality metrics, making art devolves into either romanticized creativity or instrumental work to improve skills in core content areas.

Questions about the assessment of quality of youth-produced films grew out of our extensive case study work with youth media arts organizations (YMAOs) across the US that work with young people (ages 14-20) to produce autobiographical digital art. One of the key findings from this research was that we could identify the key moments in the pedagogical process that served as stopping points for youth to reflect on their work and for mentors to determine whether youth artists were moving down productive artistic paths (Author, 2010a). We were also able to develop a method for analyzing how young people engage in complex representations of identity through the digital art they produce (Author, 2010b, under revision). Missing from all of these findings, however, was a method for assessing the quality of the products.

In this paper we use youth-produced autobiographical documentaries as an example of an artistic medium that lends itself to exploring what makes a youth-produced film good. We ask youth audiences to reflect on the criteria they use to assess the quality of films when engaged in a critical dialogue. Based on our prior research documenting the way young people learn to make art about the stories of our lives, we examined the relationship between audiences perceptions of uniqueness (termed “reportability”) their perceptions of believability (termed “credibility”) when engaging in a dialogue about the quality of narrative based art work (Author, 2008).

We find that youth do have criteria for assessing youth-produced films, regardless of their own experience with filmmaking, and that youth distinguish between “liking” a film and thinking a film is “good”. Furthermore, we find that youth take multiple paths to determining quality, though all of those paths relate the overall genre of the film to the specific creative decisions made by the filmmakers. A quality film then, is one that makes explicit the relationship between the genre in which it is made and the creative decisions that mark this film as within a genre. Our study has implications for the development of emerging criteria for evaluating digital media production practices in formal learning environments.

Authors

• Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Damiana Gibbons, Appalachian State University

• Alon Andrews, University of Wisconsin - Madison