The 13 OMI teenagers, all participants in a monthlong video camp as part of the I Am OMI project, thought they knew a lot about their neighborhood. That was before I Am OMI Project Director Woody LaBounty began showing them vintage photographs of the area and an old newsreel of Ocean Avenue in the 1920s.
It was news to them that a racetrack once stood in Ingleside Terraces, that the El Rey Theater, now a Pentecostal church, had been a popular movie palace and that the heavily populated Ocean View area was once farmland. As they watched the old newsreel of Ocean Avenue they started shouting out places they recognized.
" The old photographs and newsreel made a big impression on the kids," says photographer and educator Amanda Herman, who directed the group. "It made them start thinking about what life was like before they were around."
The idea of the video camp was to give OMI kids an opportunity to learn more about their neighborhood and explore their own lives through the medium of video.
The kids, who attended the program four days a week during the month of July of this year, learned how to use a video camera and conduct interviews before heading out into the neighborhood with their cameras and interview questions. Every day for two weeks they interviewed a different person, from Will Reno, local community leader and barbershop owner, to Marilyn and Robert Katzman, owners of a 107-year-old firehouse on Broad Street.
" They would complain to me how crappy their neighborhood was, so I think they began appreciating it more when they talked to people who cared about it and were working to improve it," Herman says.
During the second two weeks of the program the kids took cameras home and documented their own lives. They filmed their homes, their families and their neighborhood. And some talked directly into the camera about their hopes and dreams for the future. One boy took the opportunity to interview his aunt and grandmother about his dead father. "He had never even mentioned his father before," says Herman, "and after he did the filming, he began talking about him. I don't think he would have done that if it hadn't been for this program."
The video, complete with a music soundtrack and archival footage of OMI, was screened for parents, neighbors and friends this past August and was shown at an OMI history day in October. Elementary school kids will have a chance to see the video this fall.
Herman is currently conducting a second video camp with another group of OMI kids. That video will be screened at I Am OMI project events next spring.
The video camps are being sponsored by the I Am OMI project in cooperation with the YMCA's Safe Haven Program at the Ocean View Recreation Center and the OMI Beacon Center.
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To find out more about the I Am OMI project, visit the Western Neighborhoods Project website at www.outsidelands.org or send e-mail to Woody LaBounty at Woody@outsidelands.org.
OMI historical photos courtesy of Greg Gaar and Western Neighborhoods Project.