#1184: Looking Through the Lens: How Youth Practice Perspective-Shifting Through Filmmaking

Spy Hop’s “Voices of the West” program is a weeklong media production intensive offered throughout Utah. Youth participants engage in 30 hours of hands-on learning, working in small groups to produce three short films: a silent film featuring an emotion, character, and prop; a parody of a “YouTube tutorial”; and a documentary spotlighting their community. In tandem with a research study on “perspective-shifting” in youth film production, four films have been selected to demonstrate the complex, multimodal artistic decisions young filmmakers make as they consider different points of view. “Severo” is a reflective documentary about a local restaurant; “How to be a Superhero” uses the tropes of YouTube tutorials to subvert our expectations of the “superhero” and the “how-to” format; “The Seed” takes us into the perspective of a woman experiencing anxiety after reading an Instagram post; and “Huish Movie Theater” seeks to evoke nostalgia for moviegoing and community spaces.