Your Video and Tech Skills Needed: Two Years Later

It’s been two years since I wrote an article for Event DV magazine titled “Your Skills Needed!” and still the requests for assistance keep coming. Just last week, I received an email from a videographer who asked how he could help those who work in areas of the world considered less fortunate than ours.

For those of you who may not have read the original article, I’d spent some time in the summer of 2008 accompanying my oldest daughter on a trip to Acapulco, Mexico, to help with a construction project at an orphanage. While there, instead of getting the technology “down time” I’d expected due to the need to dig foundations for a dining hall, I ended up installing a wireless network and acting as a shooter for a documentary about the work going on at Casa Hogar del Niño de Acapulco.

The process of putting my video skills to work alongside Melody Warford, prompted me to write:

Your skills might be used create a video to help an aspiring missionary, whom must travel around their home country, making presentations to raising funds to cover overseas work. To do so, these missionaries must stand up in front of many houses of worship and present their work, which requires good speaking and social skills; for those who aren’t good social speakers or may have a ministry that’s difficult to describe in words, a video presentation is invaluable.

Warford spent 17 years as a graphics designer in the Washington, DC, but now organizes teams of media professionals who are willing to go on a short-term trip, covering their own costs and bringing mobile acquisition and editing equipment.

Having provided context on the previous story, what’s different about the skill needs I’m seeing during this week’s third annual visit to Casa Hogar?

Besides the size of the blisters from our Memorial Day first day of heavy construction, which seem to grow like a fish story each year, I’ve had time to contemplate new needs while helping the team break up concrete and rebar in the 1930s resort’s foundation to make way for another dormitory.

The biggest need is skills in web page and online video platforms (OVPs), including pre-recorded and live productions.

It’s not enough to capture video clips while on site, then spend a few months or weeks after the fact creating the video and make DVD copies, as we did a few years ago. Today’s short-term media mission team needs to be able to create a short documentary video during the course of the week, posting it to YouTube or Facebook or another OVP before leaving the job site. Not only does this video act partly as a testament to those who supported the short-term trip, documenting what’s been accomplished, but also acts as a heads-up to the multiple teams that will arrive to work during various weeks throughout the remainder of the summer.

Communications, including live video, are also a growing area of need: from one wireless network access point, the Casa Hogar campus is expanding to several access points this week, based on castaway 802.11b/g access points that many of us have in our basement alongside the newer 802.11n draft units we now use. The wireless access points across the local network allow staff – including interns – to stay connected with houses of worship in the United States that support the orphanage. Sometimes this takes the form of Skype audio calls, or video chats via iChat or just GoogleTalk, but all are forms of real-time communication that are key to shortening the miles—and lowering connection concerns to those who may be visiting another country for the first time.

For me, personally, this real-time communication is especially important, as this part of southern Mexico has been wracked by  the perception of uncontrollable violence (which happens in less savory parts of Mexican cities that most tourists never venture into). I’ve brought along my son and middle daughter, who are following in the footsteps of their older sibling, and the ability to connect them back to love ones in the US is a comfort to those supporting our work here.

In conclusion, the needs for skilled volunteers in places like Acapulco haven’t lessened over the past two years: If anything, they’ve increased and expanded dramatically to include more than just the traditional still-image and video-production skills. I look forward to hearing your stories of assistance in the weeks to come.

Tim Siglin (tims [at] braintrustdigital.com) is chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company specializing in training, corporate communication, government, historical preservation, documentary, and business marketing and development. He is a contributing editor to EventDV and Streaming Media.