Case story

Community-directed knowledge exchange

Peter Thomsen worked for several years as Culture and Multimedia Officer in the Multimedia Unit at the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin. He also chaired the Aboriginal subcommittee of the Top End Human Research Ethics Committee. Peter explains how video productions can be used to help make health research more effective.

The idea for the video was initiated from the community members who had been involved in the project, and who wanted to find the best way to communicate the story of the project and its outcomes back to the central Arnhem Land community. The video production could be broadcast on the local community television service, shown to the community council and at the health clinic, and also used to help convince funding bodies as part of a campaign for additional resources. (One of the outcomes of this research project was a plan to build a family centre in the community, which needed funding.

One member of the research team, Paul Wunungmurra, had some previous experience with film production as an actor, and was keen to learn more about the production side…Paul’s role was central to the production process, as he acted as a connection point of understanding between the community, the research project, and the video production. That meant he could drive the production process; identifying and organising… working with material which was largely in the local language …translating and identifying key pieces of content…. My role could be to concentrate on making sure these things could come together to tell the story effectively in a video. At the same time I was helping Paul build up his skills in production, camerawork and editing.

The pre- production phase for this video stretched over several months. We had an initial meeting with community people and the researcher to talk about what would be needed for the production. We asked them to: identify all the key people involved in the research process and make sure they would be there for the filming; make sure everybody had a clear idea of what they would be saying in the video; make sure consent forms were signed for locations and participants. The principal researcher … had a good working relationship with the community, knew what was going on and who were the best people to talk to about things. Her way of working and relating with people helped a lot.

One of the challenges in making a video when you want to allow the community and researcher to have a strong involvement … is that they also need to know about what’s needed to make the video work – to make sure the story is told effectively through the video. We spent a lot of time explaining …[Then] it took a lot of time to work through just what the story was the community members wanted to tell, what the researcher wanted to tell, and then how we could tell it. It’s very hard to develop a shared understanding of the outline of a story, but it needs to be done as early as possible in the process.

There were also some practical challenges, particularly around how people do and don’t want to be filmed. Similarly, when we first started filming the participants were primarily using traditional Aboriginal story-telling to get across the message. But we needed a different approach to make the story work. The [finished] video uses re-enactments, interviews and action to tell the story of the research project (Thomsen 2003: 7-8).

See bibliography for full references.