Case Study
What’s Next?
Hti is a not-for-profit social enterprise working in partnership with business, education and government to enhance leadership, and the employability of young people. They specialise in helping young people with barriers to employment to overcome them and get into work.
“What’s Next?” is an e learning training course designed to provide training in emotional intelligence for young people, mainly with learning disabilities, on how to be aware of and to understand their emotions and those of around them in social and work situations. Designed as a “game” learning experience, “What’s next?” has proved to be hugely popular with young people using the course and the schools and organisations where they attend.
It was felt that the “game”, avatar-led approach of the content needed to be rooted more firmly in the real world context, so Argo Media staff filmed a series of small group discussions about intense emotional experiences at a secondary school in Buckinghamshire. These consisted of three students talking to each other as a group, around the emotional experiences of one of them, covering anger, sadness, happiness and excitement. One story in particular stuck out, of a 15 year old boy who recounted his intensive anger and sadness at the death of his mother and how he coped with it.
The filming was done with two cameras and we managed to produce 25 minutes of edited material in an afternoon, which was then built into the e learning course as embedded clips in web pages.
The issues involved in getting parental approvals, ensuring that the process was non invasive into school life and that the young people involved had a positive, unstressed experience, which required careful planning and sensitive direction and interviewing.
Our approach was to set up a room with remote control cameras and radio microphones located on ceiling clamps and in corners out of the way and then leave the class to become familiar with them for a lesson, before starting filming. The camera crew minimised their intrusion into the classroom, controlling the equipment as much as possible via radio/remote links.
Our technique was to run the “story” once right through, review the material, then get the two students listening to ask additional questions to bring out key points, then because of the multiple camera approach, the two versions could be intercut as if the whole session had been done in one pass, not two.