Instructors: Charley Scull (Filament) & Nicholas Agafonoff (Real Ethnography)
Saturday, 9 November, 1:00–4:00pm
Washington Building Room 310, 20 Washington Place—map
30 participants, fee: $100
Pre-registration required: HOW TO REGISTER
Overview
Video has become an increasingly common tool in many of our workflows. Still, for some it remains a black box, while for others it falls short of its potential to do more than validate key talking points. Questions remain about how it can provide optimal value and learning in industry settings, where it so often operates in an environment of constraint.
Join experienced video ethnographers Charley Scull and Nick Agafanoff to learn a basic skill set as well as gain a deeper understanding of how ethnographic thinking can be activated through video and visuals. We’ll start with some fundamentals of the discipline and approach, and explore some of its common marketplace adaptations. Then we’ll dive into a hands-on ethnographic video activity that walks through the stages of story design, production, analysis, editing, and distribution (you’ll only need your smartphone).
Working within a context of constraint—budget, skill and resource level, project timelines, client biases—will be a key focus of the tutorial, while both scarcity and excess can feed our perceptions surrounding limitations on our work.
This session is designed to introduce both new and more seasoned ethnographers who aren’t video experts to the unique ethnographic possibilities that visual methods enable, allowing all to explore opportunities to push their practice further. Join us to learn how the application and analysis of the visual can help us to deepen and expand our ethnographic thinking!
Requirements
Participants with any amount of video experience are welcome—and it’s not necessary to have any at all. You only need to:
- Bring a smartphone and laptop with basic video editing software (iMovie, Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Clip) to the tutorial
- Watch the video “Using Video to Think Ethnographically” before the session
Instructors
Charley Scull has worked in the consumer insights and innovation spaces since 2005. His work has spanned a range of industries and focal lengths: from the granularity of package design and communication programs, to local issues about audience engagement for a botanical garden, to system-focused questions in healthcare spaces, global seafood supply chains and the future of mobility. Charley was trained as a visual anthropologist and that visual sensibility, as well as a cultural framework of analysis, and a continued practice of using video in his work, remain core strengths of his approach. In addition to extensive domestic work, he has also worked in Asia, Latin America, and the EU. Charley is a partner at Filament Insight & Innovation, a culture-centered ethnographic thinking and impact strategy firm, and was previously a partner at the Practica Group. He holds an MA in visual anthropology and a PhD in cultural anthropology from USC.
Nick Agafonoff is a market ethnographer and qualitative researcher (online & real world) with 20+ years of commercial experience. Facebook, Google, Jack Daniels, McDonald’s, Volkswagen and Nike, represent just a few of the global brands that Nick conducts large scale, in-depth, iterative qualitative and ethnographic studies for. Nick is widely known for his application of video documentation and storytelling to commercial research. He is expert in participatory and observational filmmaking techniques, ethnomethodological ‘disruptive’ techniques, auto-ethnography techniques, and non-participatory techniques, such as Eye Tracking. Presently, Nick is the Director of Lived Experience at The Practice Insights and Director of Real Ethnography.
How to Register
Tutorials are optional sessions open to all EPIC2019 attendees on a first-come, first-served basis. No on-site registration. To add a Tutorial to your EPIC2019 agenda, log into your EPIC account and modify your conference registration. Questions? registration@epicpeople.org