by YEE LISAN
alltherage@thestar.com.my

SIXTEEN creative young students recently produced a Public Service Announcement (PSA) to show that national unity is part of Malaysian culture and that we need not be reminded of it.

They had to come up with a simple story line for the video titled Recipe For Unity, which shows that though rice (a metaphor for Malaysians) can come in different shapes and sizes, it has only one purpose – to sustain people.

The students were part of Just Telling It, a four-day Young News Network (YNN) workshop, which encourages young individuals to share their experiences using social media and the latest gadgets.

The workshop kicked off with a half-day session by the SwitchUp.TV crew in Menara Star, Petaling Jaya before moving to The Farm in Lenggeng, Negri Sembilan.

Participants were introduced to basic multimedia and journalism skills such as finding story angles, formulating questions, interviewing skills, and video production to prepare them for the assignments they would receive later during the workshop.

Energetic and excited, the participants practised their newly acquired skills in an assignment to honour celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Day (FRD) – a worldwide event to take a stand for producing good food and gaining fundamental cooking skills.

“This Chinese proverb, ‘The same type of rice sustains 100 types of people’, means even though there are so many other type of people in this world, we all eat the same kind of rice. There should be no fighting over our differences,” said 18-year-old student Wong Khye Yang from Penang.

“I believe the video really showed how each person might have a different style of making something. In this video, that would be rice. It can be made into so many things, but in the end we all use the same item to make these different things. The message behind that is to not look at one person from just their culture, we are all still humans and we should look at each other as equals,” said college student Ivan Ng, 17.

“When we went to a Chinese butcher, the first thought that popped in my head was ‘is the chicken halal?’ I was really concerned because we are trying to convey such a big message so I believe we should we should always be very mindful and considerate of what we are giving out to people,” said Wan Yasmin Wan Rahimi Shah, 18.

One of the actors, Jonathan Tan, 18, shared that acting in the video helped to open his mind to accept new and different cultures.

“It’s cool to share our cultures because despite (the differences) we still accept everyone for who they are.”

Just Telling It is the first YNN workshop of the year. The visual communications camp helps participants explore effective and creative ways of telling stories through video, audio slides and photo essays.

The workshop, organised in collaboration with Nikon, is held twice a year.

To find out what is going on with the Young News Network and when the next workshop will be, check out facebook.com/SwitchUpTV