The Reckoning was just accepted to the BritDoc 08 Good Pitch”, a special pitching session in Oxford, England designed for social issue documentary projects, with a focus on outreach funding. The International Justice Central/Hub mapping prototype we developed at the BAVC Producer’s Institute will be a ...
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The Reckoning was just accepted to the BritDoc 08 Good Pitch”, a special pitching session in Oxford, England designed for social issue documentary projects, with a focus on outreach funding. The International Justice Central/Hub mapping prototype we developed at the BAVC Producer’s Institute will be a central part of our pitch, as will our network of outreach partners! This will provide a good opportunity to raise funds for the outreach campaign. The Good Pitch takes place July 23-25.
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I’m immersed at the BAVC Producer’s Institute for New Media, a 10-day think tank where 9 teams of documentary producers, video editors and multimedia developers get together to create projects that seek to extend the reach of social issue documentaries in new media spaces. Our team will propose ...
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I’m immersed at the BAVC Producer’s Institute for New Media, a 10-day think tank where 9 teams of documentary producers, video editors and multimedia developers get together to create projects that seek to extend the reach of social issue documentaries in new media spaces. Our team will propose an outreach tool we’re calling International Justice Central, or IJ Central, that will be centered on a “live” interactive map we’re designing to be overlaid on Google map technology, and will include…
1. All the locations where the ICC is operating in the world, such as its open cases in Uganda, DRC, Sudan, Central African Republic, and places it is monitoring like Colombia and Afghanistan. Also the headquarters in The Hague and the UN Security Council. The user of the map will be able to click on any of these locations and get a pop-up with more information about the cases or situations, or details about the Court in The Hague and the UN Security Council ICC briefings, incorporating characters from The Reckoning appearing in HD video we’ve shot over the past 2 years.
2. The map will receive real time text messaging pop-ups from cellphone social networks based on Twitter software that we will foster with activists and human rights defenders we’ve met in locations like northern Uganda, DRC, and Colombia, where cellphones are the most ubiquitous communication technology. Text messages from members of these networks will appear on the map at their geographical locations, giving voice to concerns, thoughts and sometimes urgent messages of people on the ground in the situation countries. For an example of a map receiving real time cellphone text messages, go to: http://twittervision.com/
3. The map will receive live news feed pop-ups related to international justice as the stories are posted. For an example of a live news map see: http://next.yahoo.net/download/newsglobe/index.html
4. The map will show all the countries that have joined the ICC and those that haven’t. It will also locate the NGOs that are working to promote the international justice system.
5. By entering your zip code, the map will show a pop-up of your congressperson/senator and their position vis-a-vis the ICC, and link to an email form addressed to the congressperson/senator to advocate for US ratification of the ICC.
6. A separate layer of the map would show locations of all other international justice activities around the world, such as the ICTY, the ICTR, the SCSL, Extraordinary Chambers in Cambodia, Inter-American Court, the Audiencia Nacional in Spain, the Fujimori trial, TRCs, and so forth, giving a comprehensive picture of the international justice movement.
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If we succeed in engaging audiences, how do we move them from engagement to building a movement for international justice and exerting pressure on policy makers?
I attended a panel in San Francisco yesterday called Sourcing the Future: Marketing and Sustainability for Social Justice Media Online where we heard ...
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If we succeed in engaging audiences, how do we move them from engagement to building a movement for international justice and exerting pressure on policy makers?
I attended a panel in San Francisco yesterday called Sourcing the Future: Marketing and Sustainability for Social Justice Media Online where we heard lots of ideas on how to increase the visibility of a documentary project, thinking of it more as content than programming, getting users to spread your work through social networks, the usual head-scratching about monetizing social issue work, and so forth, but I was left with this enduring question: how do we take someone who has become engaged with an issue and move them to political action? With some issues you can make individual changes in your lifestyle that can impact the larger picture, like the food you eat, the car you drive, etc. But other issues require collective action and political pressure. The Reckoning will raise public awareness about the ICC - from that point, how can we get the US to engage with the Court and ratify the Rome Statute? It’s going to require political pressure - if we succeed in engaging the public, we’ll have to go the next step and organize those engaged people to help us educate and press policy makers to support this important new Court. Beyond all the online tools we can bring to bear, we also need to bring people together offline. We should definitely offer screening kits to build on what AIUSA has been doing with the film we made for them, Justice Without Borders, so that people can get together around the issue and meet each other, and hopefully create nodes of engaged citizens around the country to get behind the ICC.
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In all the explorations of new media tools for outreach, let’s not overlook the role of radio and its enduring potential for interactive engagement with audiences, as we saw while filming for The Reckoning in Bunia in the Ituri region of eastern DRC. While there we met…
the dynamic Richard ...
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In all the explorations of new media tools for outreach, let’s not overlook the role of radio and its enduring potential for interactive engagement with audiences, as we saw while filming for The Reckoning in Bunia in the Ituri region of eastern DRC. While there we met…
the dynamic Richard Pituwa, who runs Canal Revelation, a radio station that has become a crucial forum for talking about justice through “Interactive Radio for Justice”, a program he produces with the irrepressible human rights activist Wanda Hall. Bunia has no newspapers, and electricity is so sporadic that TV is not a strong medium, but radios run on batteries and are ubiquitous, so radio is far and away the dominant source of information in the region. People call in all day long on their cellphones, and we filmed a fascinating program they hosted with ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo
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New tools are emerging for advocacy and social networking with text messages on mobile phones…
I just started a ten day total immersion seminar at the BAVC Producer’s Institute, a kind of high-tech think tank to develop ideas to move beyond established methods of distribution and look for ways to ...
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New tools are emerging for advocacy and social networking with text messages on mobile phones…
I just started a ten day total immersion seminar at the BAVC Producer’s Institute, a kind of high-tech think tank to develop ideas to move beyond established methods of distribution and look for ways to reach out and energize and grow our audiences through social networks, to visualize the issues through interactive mapping and gaming, and ultimately to get citizens to engage and act on the issues.
Because The Reckoning is a documentary about the global reach and effects of the International Criminal Court (ICC), I’m intrigued by the idea of making a live interactive earth map that not only shows you what the ICC is and where it operates by incorporating embedded video we’ve shot and text, but also receives news feeds and mobile phone text messages in real time. After 2 years of filming with amazing people in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Colombia, it’s clear that mobile phones would be the best way to keep hearing from them and share their insights into the struggle for justice and the defense of human rights. This was reinforced for me when I received a call at 3am, a few hours before the start of the BAVCPI, from Dennis Lemoyi, leader of the Pagak IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp in northern Uganda and a major character in our film - he was calling me on his mobile phone, of course, and had no idea where I was in the world or what time zone I was in - but my first thought was that his call augured well for our 10-day meet. And sure enough, by the end of the day, video compression guru Andy Beach showed us an amazing new online map, TwitterVision (http://twittervision.com/) that receives live text uplinks from members of Twitter mobile phone networks, showing their location on the map. So first day in, and one of my big questions was answered - how to maintain live contact with people on the ground in the situation countries. Apparently we’ll be able to adjust our map so that the Twitter feed is specific to the social network we create around international justice. So I can imagine a network made up of people like Dennis Lemoyi and other amazing voices from the field, sharing their thoughts and sending their text messages up to the map. Now we have to find a mobile phone maker or carrier to sponsor the SMS use for members of our network.
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For 25 years Skylight Pictures has been committed to producing artistic, challenging and socially relevant independent documentary films on issues of human rights and the quest for justice. Through the use of film and digital technologies, we seek to engage, educate and increase understanding of human rights amongst the public at large and policy makers, contributing to informed decisions on issues of social change and the public good. 
