ComCom 14th March
Had a tutorial with JPR about the communities project yesterday and realised we need to make a plan to ensure to the project is completed successfully. This involves ideas for future sessions with the students and looking into the context of the classes. I need to have a proper look at the SEAL DVD Leah gave us and John suggested looking into stages of early development to help us understand more what stages and changes the students might be going through.
A plan for editing need to start being made.
I would like to have a session where the students talk to and interview each other with the flip cams provided by the school. John pointed out this and other methods can be used to give the students a greater sense of ownership of the piece meaning they will engage with it more.
Another idea is having the students watch back the interviews and film their responses, and then continue to record their responses to the videos and change who’s with them. For example show changes with Leah, me and Angel and then their peers.
1st Meeting with Glenn
As part of our personal development portfolio we are expected to create exercises or other forms of small “sketchbook” projects intended to help you develop in your chosen specialist area.
I’d like to start trying to make pieces with a strong meaning behind it, so I can develop my skills for successfully getting my meaning across. I would start this by identifying issues and ideologies I hold and trying to put them into (very) short films/ videos which would hopefully allow the audience to understand what I’m trying to say.
In the session we talked about propaganda, ‘a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. Propaganda is usually repeated and dispersed over a wide variety of media in order to create the desired result in audience attitudes.’
I don’t know much about propaganda but what I know is its often associated with undesirable people and movements. I need to do more research into how it has been used but I feel it provides an interesting means for achieving what i want to do for this brief.
![thedailywhat:
On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:
Stop sending me that video.
The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.
Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.
By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.
And as far as what they do with that money:
The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.
Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.
The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”
Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.
Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.
Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.
The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.
There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.
[kony2012.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0iyiw3Jv01qzpwi0o1_r1_1280.jpg)
Directing Inspiration
As the director of the short film we’re making I’ve been thinking about techniques I can use to effectively convey the meanings of the piece to the audience. I know I’m keen to use close ups a lot for the filming and looking for films that have used them effectively.
