Cinehacking Cape Town - Embracing Informality in Pursuit of High-Quality Media
Although many common tools of media making, such as video cameras, have become more accessible in recent years, many remain inaccessible. Cinematography, lighting and sound-recording equipment, for example, can be prohibitively expensive to obtain, complex to configure, and/or require specialist knowledge to operate effectively. These barriers can prevent non-professionals who want to produce high-quality media from doing so. Cinehack is an ongoing project that investigates strategies to overcome these barriers. In this paper, we specifically report on Cinehack: Cape Town, a participatory media-making project. By co-producing hip hop videos within a community for whom media making is often a ‘means-to-an-end’, we were able to gain insights into the kinds of support needed to enable high-quality media making by non-professionals. Specifically, we highlight ways to meet users’ needs by embracing informal codes of practice via experimental making and peer-support.