Documentary Workshop
Educational Video Center, Inc.

EVC crew out on a shoot.

Photo: Alan Mendoza

Founded in 1984, Educational Video Center (EVC) is a pioneer in teaching young people documentary production and media analysis. Housed in an alternative high school in space donated by the New York City Board of Education, EVC teaches youth to research, write, interview, shoot, and edit documentaries that critically explore issues of immediate importance in their lives. Professional media artists coach groups of teenagers from the five boroughs of New York City to work collaboratively, ask good questions, and observe the familiar world around them with new eyes. Through this experience, they also learn to make aesthetic judgments about how particular camera angles, lighting, music and sound layering, and digital editing shape stories.

EVC's Documentary Workshop fosters a culture of self-reflection by having the young videographers keep regular journals - records of their ideas, observations, reactions and questions. At the conclusion of intensive 20-week sessions, students present what they have learned to parents, community members and video artists in "portfolio roundtables." They demonstrate their growth and accomplishment by showing tapes, journal entries, drafts of interview questions, edit plans, and other evidence of what they learned about the media arts. The roundtables require students to present a vigorous oral defense of their work and the creative process behind it.

EVC youth have produced over 75 documentaries. Their tapes have won more than 100 national and international festival awards, including an Emmy. Their videos are screened for public audiences in schools, libraries, community centers, museums, and on cable and broadcast television.

Perhaps most important, an estimated 85 percent of EVC youth graduate from high school despite the fact that many of them were considered academically at risk. Hundreds have gone on to college and to work in the media or technology fields. However, prowess in the media arts is not their only accomplishment. As Founder and Executive Director Steven Goodman notes, "Teaching kids to make documentaries has always been the thing that we do here. But it is not the main point. The point is the critical and creative skills learned along the way."