www.bmediacollective.org
B Media Collective is a community-based video art collective that uses documentary films, political remix videos, and skill-building workshops to catalyze collaborative work for social justice.
Production:
B Media has collaborated with a variety of local and national social justice organizations to produce films, campaign material, and promotional shorts that capture their movement’s needs. We have made films for 350.org, the Portland Central America Solidarity Committee, SEIU, Rising Tide, Right 2 Survive, the IWW, the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign, Move to Amend and Veterans for Peace, focusing on everything from immigrant rights to houselessness and environmental justice.
In addition to film production, we also provide video coverage of events in Portland, and have worked with the Civil Liberties Defense Union, Oregon Jericho, The ISO, and Portland State University as the main videographers of their conferences and events.
Workshops and Trainings:
The largest barriers to democratizing media production are cost, accessibility, training and distribution. To address these issues, B Media has developed a skills-based media training curriculum that focuses on hands on learning, connecting community members to technology resources that already exist, and open source technology to capacitate participants with the basic skills to make high quality media.
Current workshops include Introduction to Remix Video, a primer on the philosophy and process of making a political remix video and Basics of Grassroots Media, an overview of basic camera, editing, and social media skills for community video production. We also have a series of presentations on the artistic roots of remix culture, Art and Activism, and an overview of the history and current landscape of the independent media scene called Video for Social Change.
We have taught courses at Portland Community College, visiting lectures at Pacific University, and collaborated on long-term training projects with We Are Oregon and the East Portland Action Plan’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement. We have taught these workshops at Lewis and Clark, Stanford, Brown, Reed College, Evergreen, University of Oregon, and American, and done trainings with local community organizations like the Rural Organizing Project, Sisters of the Road, and the Sunnyside Unemployment Group.
Community Media Movement:
B Media is an active element of Portland’s community media movement. In 2006 and 2008, we spearheaded the Grassroots Media Camp, a city wide skill-share partnering with Portland Community Media, KBOO Radio, and PCC’s Multimedia Department. The conference coordinated over 50 free media workshops available to the community, with a focus on accessibility for traditionally marginalized voices.
B Media also actively produces creative work that documents and provides insight into our struggles for collective resistance in entertaining and informative ways. We have a series of films called Art and Resistance, exploring the intersection of art and activism in the Americas through case studies of different artist collectives in Venezuela and Mexico, and an ongoing Variety Show, a video vaudeville experience that cross pollinates local documentaries, remix videos and found footage.