Visible People's feature film, released 6 April 2011.
Showing posts with label Invisible Children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Invisible Children. Show all posts
Rough Cut
Tomorrow the five of us will be making our final Visible People presentation in-class, and concluding what has been a remarkable journey into the depths of Invisible Children's media.
As part of Visible People's "feature" film (***to be released tomorrow***), I've been working on putting together Take 3 of my Invisible Children movie-making analysis. In advance of this conclusion, please take a look at Invisible Children's first movie, "Invisible Children: Rough Cut," posted via Google Video by Laren, Bobby and Jason, Invisible Children's co-founders and this movie's creators.
The story that started it all, this movie has been the focal point of my analysis throughout our living project.
In all honesty, I've struggled with putting together this analysis as I began our project convinced that Invisible Children's movies had to be biased, and had to perpetuate the saviour mentality evident in other aspects of this organization's media.
What I came to grasp over the course of this analysis is that Invisible Children's movie-making does, in fact, place significant emphasis on the faces and voices of the people of northern Uganda. In letting the children and practitioners from the country speak for themselves, Invisible Children's movie-making makes visible important parts of these people's experiences, knowledge, and wishes.
"Invisible Children: Rough Cut" is a prime example of this visibility. The film begins with Laren, Bobby and Jason's story but quickly shifts to an exploration of the conflict, Joseph Kony, and the people of northern Uganda, told through first-hand accounts or by researchers or officials who are part of the northern Ugandan community. What's shown are representations of hope, not only suffering.
Limited to fifty minutes, Invisible Children simple CANNOT tell the whole story, whether that story is that of the decades-long conflict, Joseph Kony, the thousands of night-commuting children, the Global Night Commutes in America, or a single boy named Tony.
A movie is a select form of media - an art form - who's utility is bounded by its makers, technology, and the experiences, knowledge, and wishes that viewers themselves bring to the theater.
As a viewer yourself, who's voice do you hear?
What emotions do you feel?
And what does a movie like "Invisible Children: Rough Cut" make you want to do after shutting off the screen?
visible people's T-shirts are ready
Today we got together at Meredith’s chapter room and made our own T-shirts. One by one, each white T-shirt was gracefully spray painted in gold by Myriam and we put our heads together to think of messages to write on our T-shirts. What kind of words would challenge the commodification of personal stories for the sake of advocacy? Each member in our group will be blogging about each T-shirt so please keep visiting our blog!
The message on my T-shirt is: “Am I a-wear-ivist?”
Creating culture
The more I go through IC's website content, the more I feel that it has nothing to do with Ugandans. Well, I should qualify that statement. Yes, it has information on their work (somewhat), although they are "following" Kony into Congo, they are helping rebuild schools, they are setting up radio towers.
But the problem is, they also have a music blog, links to their videos, photos, clothing... if I didn't know better, you'd think this is a hipster clothing company or something. It's just plain distracting!
But the problem is, they also have a music blog, links to their videos, photos, clothing... if I didn't know better, you'd think this is a hipster clothing company or something. It's just plain distracting!
Resources, what resources?
The following is a list of resources found on the Invisible Children Uganda (ICU) site:
Social media 2: Facebook
The wall of the Invisible Children’s Facebook displays an incredible number of posts by IC’s supporters. It was especially astonishing to see the real time updates on the number of people who “like” IC’s page. For example, take a look at the updates from the following days:
March 24, 2011
9:50pm: 358,849 people
10:15pm: 358,873 people
11pm: 358, 911 people
March 25, 2011
9:50pm: 359,500 people
10:15pm: 359,514 people
11pm: 359,532 people
aWAReness4IC
So we were having our regular Friday afternoon meeting, just like Asuka said in an earlier post. I went over to our Twitter to see if we had any new followers. We had been pretty psyched that @Invisible (IC's Twitter) had been following us the week of our interview with Jedidiah.
Alas! They stopped. =(
Alas! They stopped. =(
Link them all - where would social media take us?
So here we are at a Boulevard café on Friday afternoon as usual.
First hour passed by in a relaxed atmosphere as we chatted away about our progress and action plans for the up coming week. We will be writing up a script for our film and even making our own logo T-shirts! Please keep in mind though, we are critical about the merchandising aspect of the Invisible Children's project -what do their T-shirts speak about the people in Uganda? How is Visible People's T-shirts going to look like? Wait and see.
First hour passed by in a relaxed atmosphere as we chatted away about our progress and action plans for the up coming week. We will be writing up a script for our film and even making our own logo T-shirts! Please keep in mind though, we are critical about the merchandising aspect of the Invisible Children's project -what do their T-shirts speak about the people in Uganda? How is Visible People's T-shirts going to look like? Wait and see.
Social media 1: Twitter
March 21st is a special day for 2 reasons:
First of all, today is an International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Second, today marks the 5th anniversary of Twitter!
First of all, today is an International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Second, today marks the 5th anniversary of Twitter!
Thinking about SNS: offline and online identity
Social Networking Sites.
In many respects, the social media/Social Networking Sites (SNS) are changing the ways in which we communicate and acquire information online. The social media created a new platform, or a public digital space that affects how we interact with one another. The increasing popularity of bite-size information seems to reflect the progressive changes in our concept of time, lifestyle and how we consume information.
Compared to a more personal style of online interaction through emails, SNS uses the online space for people to communicate publicly. As noted by Jedidiah, although there are debates as to whether online communication can substitute face-to-face interaction, what is interesting about SNS is that people can “see” what other people are talking, even if you are not directly involved in the conversation.
Of course, SNS is a great social tool to keep in touch with friends or acquaintances. But in addition, I think the potential and the effectiveness of SNS lie in the speed of real time updating of the information and the way it can be a great resource for like-minded individuals to share/collect information and collaborate towards the same goal, whether it be planning parties, school related events, or even politically related actions. The possibility of SNS depends on their users.
I hope this doesn’t sound too abstract, but I think SNS users live in 2 realities: one offline and another online. Once you log into your SNS account, you are consciously or subcontinuously making a switch between two identities. My point is not to argue that these two identities do not always coincide, but I just wanted to note that the SNS user’s online posts shape the identity of the user. And what is peculiar about SNS is that whatever the user posts online is visible to the rest of the SNS users who are connected to the user as a “friend” or a “follower” and the user also has a choice to make it visible to anybody with access to the internet.
This is probably enough from my rant on SNS – how does this all relate to the work of Invisible Children?
My thoughts started to spin around because of an answer I got from Jedidiah about a question I asked:
“When did Invisible Children started to use SNS and why?”
His answer was “from day 1” that IC was founded and he perceives SNS as a “manifestation of personality of the people who work here”.
In response to my other question about who updates the IC’s SNS, Jedidiah explained both the difficulties of coordinating the “level of cohesiveness” in representing the voice of IC [because the IC has multiple staffs who have access to their SNS account] but also the opportunities in using the SNS strategically to “be something that does not exist” by personifying the organization to give it a more human quality to the organization.
What does this really mean and how does it work? For the next blog post I will be exploring the theme of SNS in more detail, by analyzing the following SNS used by the IC:
· Twitter
· Facebook
Hope you are getting excited about our Visible People Project’s progress as we are!
Got a Twitter account? Follow or Tweet us @ visible_people :)
Why Visible People?
By naming our project, "Visible People", we hope to raise two issues that is pertinent not only to our critique of Invisible Children, but also to humanitarianism in general.
Children are often used as the face of advocacy campaigns and calls to donate to humanitarian relief efforts. Let's face it, pictures of suffering children bring in money. It's not a bad thing that people want to save children. Faces of suffering children cause us to feel compassion and empathy. We don't want kids to get hurt. No one does. It's a natural human response. It's also effective marketing. We want to point out that adults are also affected by natural disasters and political crises. By silencing the voices of these adults, a humanitarian organization oversimplifies the crisis and eliminates the possibility of peering into the deeper root causes.
That leads us to the second point. The name Invisible Children refers to the idea that the crisis in northern Uganda, in particular, the night commuters (children travelling each night to the town centre to sleep in order to avoid being kidnapped by rebel forces), had been invisible to the world. However, with IC's tireless advocacy campaign in North America and its focus on trying to raise awareness about the Uganda among the average North American teenager, has the focus shifted from Uganda back onto North America? Has the night commuter's own voice and the voices of the Acholi community leaders hidden behind glitzy IC campaigns to turn these North American teenagers into so-called humanitarians by simply joining a campaign to raise money?
Children are often used as the face of advocacy campaigns and calls to donate to humanitarian relief efforts. Let's face it, pictures of suffering children bring in money. It's not a bad thing that people want to save children. Faces of suffering children cause us to feel compassion and empathy. We don't want kids to get hurt. No one does. It's a natural human response. It's also effective marketing. We want to point out that adults are also affected by natural disasters and political crises. By silencing the voices of these adults, a humanitarian organization oversimplifies the crisis and eliminates the possibility of peering into the deeper root causes.
That leads us to the second point. The name Invisible Children refers to the idea that the crisis in northern Uganda, in particular, the night commuters (children travelling each night to the town centre to sleep in order to avoid being kidnapped by rebel forces), had been invisible to the world. However, with IC's tireless advocacy campaign in North America and its focus on trying to raise awareness about the Uganda among the average North American teenager, has the focus shifted from Uganda back onto North America? Has the night commuter's own voice and the voices of the Acholi community leaders hidden behind glitzy IC campaigns to turn these North American teenagers into so-called humanitarians by simply joining a campaign to raise money?
Hello? Hello? Invisible Children's Silence
The five of us sent an email to Jason, Russell and Jedidiah the other day, asking for a brief interview with them for our research project on Invisible Children's various media tools and campaigns. Jason and Russell are both Invisible Children Co-Founders and Filmmakers, and Jedidiah is Invisible Children's Director of Public & Media Relations.
