The Co-creation Initiative at Skidmore College is looking for a story to tell, and the organizers think the community can provide it.
The grant-funded, media-production initiative will offer its first Community Pitch Session from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, May 11, via Zoom. Organizers will hear community members’ ideas for documentary projects, their website says.
Backed by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Co-creation Initiative — a project of the college’s John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative, or MDOCS — will pair members of the Skidmore College community with partners from the region to tackle social issues of our time.
“We’re making available the tools, skills and approaches of the documentary arts to the entire community,” said Adam Tinkle, director of MDOCS. “We are really looking to create sustainable and long-lived partnerships that develop new ideas for projects, and for them to result in nonfiction work in any medium.”
The Zoom session is an opportunity for “cluster collaboration.”
“We want to find connections between community partners and what they have been doing, and faculty and staff on the Skidmore campus to build relationships through dialogue,” said Angela Beallor, a documentarian and creative leader in the Co-creation Initiative.
Tinkle said the Co-creation Initiative is inspired by the traditions of documentarians tackling social issues.
“When thinking about documentary and non-fiction, whose story needs to be told?” Tinkle said.
As examples, he cited Aggie Bazaz's 360-degree virtual reality film "How to Tell a True Immigrant Story," about backstretch employees at Saratoga Race Course, created in collaboration with Saratoga Economic Opportunity Council (now known as LifeWorks Community Action), and an exhibition about community reaction to a trash-burning power plant that teamed an environmental studies professor and the Sheridan Hollow Alliance for Renewable Energy.
This Pitch Session is the first step in telling stories deemed necessary.
The Co-creation team will work to pair members of the Skidmore community — faculty, staff and students — to community projects, then provide technical and creative support to start the project. When they are ready to move forward, the Co-creation Initiative will fund production, whether the outcome be a podcast, a short film, artwork, or anything else the team can imagine.
“We’re talking about storytelling and people who have a cause, an issue, an idea, the thing they’re doing in the world,” Tinkle said. “There’s always a story and there are so many ways to potentially tell those stories.”
To learn more, visit the website; to register for the Pitch Session, click here.