We are still at the beginning of the year, but Change Making Tour is already working hard: a group of six volunteers from Spain and Italy just finished a training course in Galbiate (Italy) to learn how to create videos and social media content for the Change Making Tour project.
Bea and Laura (Asociación Brújula Intercultural) with Anita, Tommaso, and Peppe (Associazione NoBorders) organized the training course at Ostello Parco Monte Barro, a hostel located near the top of Mount Barro, located near Lake Como, with a stunning view on the nearby lakes and on the city of Milan.
6 volunteers, 2 countries of origin, 2 destinations
Christian, Gabriela, Mar, Marina, Marta, and Stefano (me), are the six volunteers who will go to Colombia and Brazil in February: in order to be as proficient as possible in our mission, we attended an intensive week of video making lessons on Mount Barro by the tutor Mario Corrado, a professional filmmaker from Naples.
The lessons involved all the aspects of the filming process: setting up the camera with correct aperture and shutter speed, lighting, audio recording, and of course editing. Mario also wanted to challenge us to guess the titles of the movies he was using as examples during the lessons. As I don’t have a picture of the final chart (and also because I ranked quite badly), I can’t show you the final results of this “competition”, but it was definitely stimulating.
As in every Erasmus+ project, the learning was not limited to front lectures: we were experimenting with the techniques and the concepts they learned by filming our own videos as a sort of “exam”.
By the way, besides learning and experimenting, this week-long training also had the purpose of getting us to know each other and have fun together: after all, when we will be in Colombia and Brazil, we will live and work together for two months, so forming a solid group before arriving there has the utmost importance.
So whether we were shooting a video or learning new card games to play together, we shared one week of life that will allow us to arrive in Latin America as a team. Well, two teams: three of us (Mar, Marina, and Marta) will go to Minca, in Colombia, while the other three (Christian, Gabriela and me) will be living in Guarapuava, Brazil. We will work respectively with Misión Gaia and Outro Olhar, two local associations that are part of the Change Making Tour project.
In the gallery below you can see all of us (in alphabetical order), smiling and ready for the journey!
Only a few days separate us from our departure: we are all preparing documents and equipment, checking the flights and doing homework (this very post is in fact an exercise for what I will write when in Brazil). We all can’t wait for reaching South America and for many of us is a point of change in our lives: some of us left their job to participate in this experience, for others is a way to come out of a hard time, but we all have lots of fears and lots of expectations about leaving our homes in Europe and flying to another continent.
In the next two months you will see many new videos, photos and posts from Colombia and Brazil. As travellers, we will try to convey our emotions about the novelty of what we will see for the first time; at the same time, as reporters, we will also try to show you these two countries from the point of view of the people who live there.
