We’re in India. Actually, I’m not. But our Executive Producer, Danny Alpert, is there with our top camera/sound crew. The trip is for the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) and they will be traveling all around India to document AJWS’s work on the ground. This is the first of several trips that will also take us to Africa and Central America.
In India, almost two years after the tsunami hit, there is still rebuilding to do. Not just rebuilding of property, but social and community building as well. And while AJWS has responded to the tsunami through support of long-term rebuilding efforts, their mission is much broader than disaster response. AJWS works in other parts of India, helping empower women and fighting poverty. They make grants to support grassroots programs and they have a well-developed volunteer corp that places senior professionals in NGOs for 3-12 months. The combination of money and skill multiplies the impact of either alone. AJWS also knows that advocacy and education are important for social change – there is only so much you can do with only so much grant money. AJWS is advocating for action both in the US and abroad to address the kinds of structural or legal issues only government action can solve. (For example, they are leading the way to pressure the UN and US on Darfur.)
So, our office has been abuzz with activity in preparation for the trip and now we are waiting for the first reports from the team on the ground. I hope we will be able to upload some short raw footage to the blog here while they are still in India.
Here’s some samples from the itinerary. Go to the AJWS site to learn more about their work in these places.
Tamil Nadu
25th
Late night arrival in Chennai. Stay at airport hotel
26th
Morning: Fly to Tiruvananthapuram,
Afternoon: drive to Nagercoil
27th
Location: Nagercoil
Setting: teaching tribal nursing students.
Classroom setting teaching English
Film interview with volunteers at end of day
28th
Morning: Drive to Thirukadayur (5-6 hours) Arrive @ 1pm
General Notes about work in Thirukadayur
- Peak of Monsoon season, it is going to be raining for the majority of the time we are in the Tamil region.
29th
Morning: ROSE – disaster response drill #1
- Actual Drill takes 30- 45 min
- 5 groups to follow (warning group, evacuation group, first aid group)
Setting: Oceanside, 50-60 people. Lots of motion, chaos – people carrying stretchers, running back and forth from the ocean, sitting in first aid section, etc.
30th
Morning: ROSE
Afternoon: Drive to Chennai (5hrs.)
1st
Early morning – drive to Chennai airport
Fly to Bombay
Arrive in Bombay at 11pm
Maharashtra at 2pm
Full sun 7-10am – 5pm
Morning: Udaan (10-3)
Setting: Discussion with support group members, interview about HIV status…
Late Afternoon: Fly to Vadodara leave at 3:30 flight at 5pm arrive 7pm
- World Aids Day
As long as there has been film, there have been film reviews. When I was younger, Tom Shales wrote for the Washington Post (on film, not TV) and he could be brutal, which I loved. Stephen Hunter from the Post is not too shabby in his review of “Deck the Halls” the latest Christmas crap to be pushed on us. Here’s a sample:
So anyway, “Dreck the Halls” . . . ” Deck the Halls” watches as the two men go all territorial on the Christmas zeitgeist, with the vicious little rodent Broderick calling in the cops, while the bloated if tiny psychopath DeVito keeps upping the wattage. Whenever the director, John Whitesell, doesn’t know what to do, he throws in some absurdist action sequence, such as a runaway sleigh pulled by 145-year-old horses that yank Broderick through downtown where he wrecks all the Christmas finery without hurting anyone.
Now, if the movie had any guts at all, it would end up with Broderick and DeVito dead on the front lawn, one having pushed a bayonet into the guts of the other one just as the second brought the baseball bat down on the first one’s skull. Okay? That’s the internal logic of the picture. Do you think they go there? Or do you think they both see the Error in Their Ways and darn it all, become friends in the end to the tune of cash registers doing a ka-ching ode to joy?
I literally didn’t count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hustlers who made it, on their way to the bank.
Part of our job here at See3 is to remind you how powerful video can be. You should be using video to show the world what you do at your organization because with video the viewer has an experience that you can’t get in print. With this one — ski-flying down Mount Eiger in Switzerland — I had my heart in my throat:
I have mentioned Beth Kanter in the last two blog posts, so I might as well add another one. I want to share with (both of) my readers Beth’s video and her fundraising project. Beth Kanter is a blogger and nonprofit consultant. She is on the Board of an organization called the Sharing Foundation. Beth is using all of the web tools at her disposal to raise some money for this group. Her goal is $750 by the end of the year. You can help her reach that goal by donating right now using this cool donation widget (allowing portable fundriasing like this) from ChipIn.
What I want to show you is the video Beth made about this effort. It is super simple and you should be inspired to do your own video from it. Using some home video, still photos and a voice over, Beth created a nice little video that has much more impact than if she just wrote about the subject. If you think video is out of your reach, you are wrong. Have a look.
So in my Webinar today about video the issue of Fair Use came up. It came up because we did a little mash-up for N-TEN to promote the contest we are running. And N-TEN was told this was illegal and we would all go to jail and they were going to take it down.
I said… hold on a minute! Maybe this is Fair Use. Here’s what I wrote to Katrin, the ED of N-TEN:
Katrin
It’s your call, but I think I didn’t explain my position too well here when we spoke about it. I am pretty sure this would fall under the legal principle of FAIR USE. Companies like Disney and the music companies have tried to get people to think that *any use* of a copyrighted material is not allowed. This is not the case.
From Stanford’s Fair Use Guidelines:
“2. Parody
A parody is a work that ridicules another, usually well-known work, by imitating it in a comic way. Judges understand that by its nature, parody demands some taking from the original work being parodied. Unlike other forms of fair use, a fairly extensive use of the original work is permitted in a parody in order to “conjure up” the original.”
Judges are required to look at 4 factors in determining Fair Use:
“The four factors judges consider are:
1. the purpose and character of your use
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market.”
The use here being nonprofit, educational, no impact on the potential market, etc… Here’s a link to read more.
An attorney will most likely tell you that judges decide what is fair use, there is no other way to know for sure, and better safe than sorry. I think that’s a cop out. Seems to me that no judge would hold this as infringement based on the standards and no rights holder would even try to test it in this case.
So, I think you shouldn’t be too defensive here, and I think we shouldn’t disqualify entries that appropriately parody copyrighted materials.
Michael.
The exciting thing about all of this is that I think N-TEN is now thinking about taking some leadership on this issue and helping nonprofits – as much as anyone can – navigate the world of Fair Use. One important source of information for us comes from the Center for Social Media at American University. They have been the most important source of information for filmmakers on this issue and I encourage you to check them out.
I just want to also give some props to Beth Kanter, who reminded me during the Webinar today when the issue of Fair Use came up that folks should look to Creative Commons for a lot of material that they can use without worry.
And Katrin pointed out a video that is on YouTube on this issue. It is a nice little primer on the subject. I have embedded it below:
Today I ran a webinar for N-TEN on nonprofits and video. I want to thank everyone that attended. I also want to thank Beth Kanter, who contributed at some key points. Wow, it’s hard to speak for 90 minutes! (And most likely harder to listen…)
I promised everyone a list of resources and so here it is.
Was this the first YouTube election? In the Sunday Times, Frank Rich writes about the self-destruction of Senator George Allen, who was “caught on tape” during a campaign stop in rural Virginia:
[Senator Allen’s double-digit lead] ended famously on Aug. 11, when Mr. Allen, appearing before a crowd of white supporters in rural Virginia, insulted a 20-year-old Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who was tracking him with a video camera. After belittling the dark-skinned man as “macaca, or whatever his name is,” Mr. Allen added, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”
The moment became a signature cultural event of the political year because the Webb campaign posted the video clip on YouTube.com, the wildly popular site that most politicians, to their peril, had not yet heard about from their children. Unlike unedited bloggorhea, which can take longer to slog through than Old Media print, YouTube is all video snippets all the time; the one-minute macaca clip spread through the national body politic like a rabid virus. Nonetheless it took more than a week for Mr. Allen to recognize the magnitude of the problem and apologize to the object of his ridicule. Then he compounded the damage by making a fool of himself on camera once more, this time angrily denying what proved to be accurate speculation that his mother was a closeted Jew. It was a Mel Gibson meltdown that couldn’t be blamed on the bottle.
