This part of the project will build on the success of the Little League of First Nations project. The goal is to empower the community itself to collect, store and preserve their own historical record. The Living History Project will also create a permanent record of the project in a documentary film.

The Living History Project has been designed to knit the generations of the urban aboriginal community together by bringing contemporary skills development into the equation. The concept behind the project is to capture the ‘Living History’ that will be revealed through the interaction of the children, their parents, extended families and the elders participating in the Little League of First Nations project.

The community itself will document, record and shoot their own video of the ‘Little League of First Nations’ project from conception to completion. This will be done under the guidance and supervision of a small team of professional media artists. There will be two separate productions that result from this initiative. The first will be a community archive of the project on VHS tape as well as DV/DVD media and documented through an online database and web portal. The second will be a professionally produced ‘Shooting the Shooters’ work that will professionally document the entire process of the community learning how to capture and document their own ‘Living History.’

The Shooting the Shooters documentary record will be released as a ‘Living History’ work that will be distributed throughout the Vancouver area as well as broadcast on a number of television channels. (The final title will be determined through a collaborative process within the project)

Additionally, there will be material that is captured during the project that will be included on the finished video as a resource for Early Childhood Education. This will include songs, dances and even some games that can be sung along to, danced along with or used as part of a ‘learning/play’ session. These materials will emerge from the community itself, aided by the game design background of the nuMedia team.

Rationale for the Project

The program will use the camera as a metaphor for capacity building. The principle that learning is an end in and of itself applies here. By teaching new skills that are contemporary, think MTV Generation, yet focused on one’s own First Nations heritage produces a cross generational effect.

The rationale behind this project is to marry the past with today in such a way that it leaves a living record for generations to come. The concept is to promote interconnectedness through community involvement in learning and experiencing the filmmaking process.

Digital and video technology are pervasive in our wired world and this project will result in building community capacity for capturing and preserving the lives of the members and the life of a community. This can extend beyond the life of this project as it is based in skills development and knowledge sharing.

The rule in the Little League is that everyone plays. That rule holds for this community- based project. Everyone will have a chance to ‘play’. Children as young an seven or eight years old will be invited to work the cameras at these community events. Young parents, their children and even their grandparents will be given video workshops about camera operation, simple recording, editing and interviewing techniques to foster the idea that anyone can contribute to the ‘Living History’ of one’s own people.

Families will be invited to bring the project home. There will be a number of special ‘home video production’ workshops to teach the fundamental production concepts behind, for example, the interview, the pan, the close-up etc. Families and individuals will be invited to go out on their own and shoot an interview, a family gathering or traditional celebration, song or dance and then bring it to the next workshop to share with others. The project will sponsor individual involvement by sponsoring a contest for the best ‘home video’. The content would be included in the completed documentary and the winning entry will win one of the two project cameras.
Building Capacity

In terms of capacity building it is the hope that this projects biggest achievement will be to foster the idea that anyone can help build their own historical record. The capacity we want to extend into the community is that ‘you’ can be a part of your own ‘Living History.’

On the material side, 1000 copies of the documentary record (Shooting the Shooters) of the Little League of Nations project will be made available and distributed in the urban aboriginal community through the partners as well as through libraries, schools and other educational organizations. The project will also put up a community portal to share the process as well as the results of this project. The portal will be maintained after the end of this funding as part of the VASE website and will be maintained by the community of users that will result as a result of this initiative.