By John Owoo
(In Accra – Ghana)
A six-day training programme organized by West African Culture on the Move for arts collectives, artists and cultural journalists ended last week in the Ghanaian capital Accra.
Co funded by Association Nord Ouest Cultures and Art in West Africa Fund – the participants, who were drawn from diverse disciplines including music, dance, theater, poetry, film and literature -benefited from writing, filming and editing skills among others.
Facilitated by journalist / academic Nanabanyin Dadson and filmmaker / academic Aseye Tamakloe, participants were taken through journalistic principles and techniques and introduction to ethical / deontological principles of cultural journalism.
Others are techniques for finding relevant and reliable cultural information, processing cultural information, editing, revising and formatting content, adapting content for web and digital platforms, respecting copyright and use of sources in articles.
The rest are mobile phone shooting, mobile phone / computer video editing, file management / transfer, distribution methods on social media, web publishing, ability to configure a recording kit and prepare the deliverable and use of soft wares such as Capcut Application and Canva.
Participants equally benefited from a visit to the National Museum, where they were provided with a guided tour by an official of the Museum, who gave a lecture on the history of Ghana from the precolonial period to contemporary times.
All participants expressed their appreciation to the funders and organizers of the workshop and called for further workshops to enhance the capacity of artists and arts associations to collaborate with the media and effectively disseminate their artistic creations on social media.
Gilbert Agbevide and Eustache Agboton of the WACOM secretariat later presented a laptop and two mobile phones to artsghana.net for use by participants of the workshop. Artsghana was further tasked to assist the collectives in shaping their articles for publication in mainstream and social media.
The workshop was made possible with financial contribution from European Union and support from the Organization of African Caribbean and Pacific States Secretariat. Similar workshops are scheduled for Lome (Togo) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso).
