Staff Interview with Robin Canfield

What inspired you to co-found Actuality Media?

I have always been a storyteller, of both fiction and non-fiction. For Actuality Media, the idea began as a search for the means to tell the stories of unknown changemakers working towards inspirational goals around the globe. It is a way to bring recognition to people making the world a better place—though we envisioned working with smaller changemakers, their work not only would deserve to be recognized, but could be replicated elsewhere, or serve to inspire others.

When Actuality Media officially formed, another co-founder’s own experience with study abroad for film had brought us to consider the great possibilities of what students could accomplish studying abroad, and so another avenue was born to the project—to teach people how to tell the stories of others, stories of good, and to hopefully put emerging storytellers and filmmakers on a path to telling more positive stories.

Can you tell us about your current role as the International Programs Director and a Curator of Good?

As the International Programs Director at Actuality Media, I help build and design each year’s programs—both our annual Documentary Outreaches and our Faculty-led Field Study programs. Our custom curriculum is always being refined. In fact, we’re very excited for the communication and ethics-centered focuses we’re bringing into the curriculum in 2019. I’m currently working on a handbook for social documentary storytelling that builds on the curriculum and our years of experience with these projects.

With individual Outreaches I focus on evaluating locations, selecting changemakers, finding our instructors, and arranging logistics. We change locations each year to find and film more of the best changemakers out there, so it’s a fresh start each year on setting up the projects. For the Field Study projects with university groups, those can go shorter or longer than our Outreaches and I take the lead on building the program and tailoring it to meet faculty needs.

This all overlaps with being Curator of Good as it starts with changemakers. I’m constantly finding, researching, being told about, and otherwise encountering new, good changemakers. I spread information constantly—our own films of course, and the films of others—but also it’s hard for me to sit down with any given changemaker and not have one or two organizations to suggest they coordinate or consult with for whatever project they’re looking to take on next.

What is the experience of co-leading Documentary Outreaches and Faculty-led Field Studies like?

The Production Supervisors on a Documentary Outreach and on a Faculty-led Field Study are not usually splitting or sharing roles so much as taking on different responsibilities. Every trip, every leader has to be there for the student crews to help acclimate them to the area, ensure that crew members are working well together, and for any situations that might arise outside of production. On early Documentary Outreaches and on several Field Study programs, I have filled the role of coordinator—arranging housing, meals, transport and other logistics, as well as making sure that morale stays high. Taking on the Instructor role is a whole different challenge with leading lessons to focus students on the most important aspects of the storytelling process as they research and plan their films. With this, one must be continually offering up guidance and feedback to help crews complete production and be on the path to making the best films they can.

Personally I’m also a photographer (see the cover of “Documentary Voice & Vision” by Kelly Anderson for some of my work), and I have lots of Behind The Scenes shooting experience. I’m not out with crews every day during production, but I often take 1000-2000 photos on a project. I spend a lot of time observing and documenting the student crews at work. This has me with the crews often when they can use some guidance and feedback as well. Filming and post-production is one of my favorite parts of any program. The project is all about storytelling, but planning and filming is for capturing the story. Then comes the Paper Edit, our method for refining the story. Every bit of the story goes up on the wall, written out and categorized on notecards. Crew members will rearrange and replace the cards, then rearrange them again (and again) until they have a better story. I’ve been up at all hours of the night with crews working on their Paper Edits. There is nothing like watching a tired crew re-energize at 12AM at the realization of an awesome new approach to their story, and being carried on by the enthusiasm.

You select overseas locations for Actuality Media programs. What qualities are important when selecting a location?

There are many things we look for in qualities of locations. Three things that have to be there for us to have a successful program are housing, infrastructure, and changemakers. But of course, the first thing we look at is safety. On every Actuality Media project we take the safety of our students and staff very seriously. Before selecting a location for a project we look at the history of the area and current situations, we talk to locals and expats on the ground, and look at other travelers’ experiences before making a decision.

Housing should count as part of infrastructure but it’s a set requirement while other parts of the infrastructure are more variable; Are there fun things to do? Good places to eat? Public transportation for getting around? Water and power are a given for most places we look at, too, though we warn everyone they could go away for a while during our travels (we even coined the term “wifi drought” to help people be ready for the possibility that the internet could go away for a while).

With changemakers, we look to be sure there are many interesting organizations with good story possibilities, but also that several of them are in the area we would base in. I make no assumption that any one organization is going to be the perfect candidate organization and work with us (though often I find ones I’m more hopeful we’ll work with) but I can look at a list of local organizations and know when there’s enough that we’ll sign up the few we need. Part of keeping costs down for our participants is by spreading base costs across multiple crews, so we need multiple subject organizations.

What can participants expect from Actuality Media programs?

I’ve proudly told many people how I think social justice documentary projects are the ideal form of study abroad experience. The quickness with which students are immersed in the lives of locals is incredible—not house-families and not school-friends, but locals working hard to improve their community. Locals whose stories are worth telling, and whose homes must be visited, families met, work filmed, and lives followed very closely for researching and filming a character. On any Actuality Media program we teach, we guide, we support crews through all stages of production, but it all comes down to storytelling. Everyone is a storyteller, and everyone can be a better storyteller.

Describe your ideal Actuality Media participant.

People who study film and media are great participants—the ideas and experience they bring to the table is great. But, sometimes the right crew member with no production experience or storytelling training comes at a documentary idea from such a new angle that it shifts the whole telling of the story in a wonderful way. For both kinds of people they do best on our programs when they do well working with new people. Having the personality to be part of the team is much more what I look for rather than a person who will tell the rest of the crew “This is how it is. This is the only way.” A story can be told in so many ways.

Why is it important for individuals to travel and experience new cultures?

There are all manner of axioms about travel and experiencing new cultures that do well to explain the importance of both. For me, partly from studying story structure and partly from experiencing travel, you begin to group people in your head by their characteristics and qualities—determining the character role they would fill in a given story. With this view I travel the world and see that people around the world have so much in common; it never fails to astound me.

What does meaningful travel mean to you?

Life never adds up to what a textbook tells you. Meaningful travel should include giving something back to the people and places that meant something to you on your travels, but it doesn’t have to. That said, meaningful travel means at least stepping off of the cursory tours that act like a checklist for textbook summaries of any given location and experiencing life like the locals live it. Seeing how differently the world can function outside one’s own personal experiences is integral to meaningful travel—to grasp the basic concept of how much common ground we do have with people around the world despite different manners of living.

If you could participate on an Actuality Media program, which would you choose and why?

I can’t say there is any one Actuality Media program I would choose. With different locations and different changemaker subjects each year, it is just to hard to say.

What hopes do you have for the future of Actuality Media?

To keep growing and to continue telling positive stories is our biggest hope. We’ve been in operation long enough now that we’ve seen many former crew members be on their way in fantastic careers for film, photography, and other manners of storytelling. In 2019 all of our staff for Outreaches will be Collective members—people who participated in an Actuality Media program in the past. I find it super exciting that not only did those crew members enjoy the project so much that they’ve kept on with positive storytelling, but they also want to come back and help put others on the same path.

And of course, the social justice filmmaking handbook will be an entirely new entry in the story of Actuality Media. It began as a work to give out to our own crew members but some faculty friends mentioned their need for such a text in the classroom and, well, now I’m nearly done with a first draft of a text that will help anyone tell a good story about a changemaker, a text that should fit nicely in their pocket so it can go anywhere with them on their travels.