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News from BDSJS and Facing Climate Change
Collaborations for Cause
Collaborations for Cause: A retreat for nonprofits, change-makers and visual storytellers.
This May 4th and 5th, Blue Earth is bringing together photographers, NGOs and communications professionals to explore best practices, synergy and the collaborative future of storytelling. Whether you work with an organization that’s trying to reach new audiences, or are a photographer interested in cause-driven projects, you’ll leave the retreat with new ideas, strategies and connections.
We helped put together the program and if you’ve been interested in taking a workshop with us, this will be even better. We’ll present the backstory to a few of our recent projects during an event packed with folks from Braided River, The Gates Foundation, FusionSpark, Pandau,The University of Washington, Blue Earth and more.
The retreat will be hosted by the Langley Center for New Media on Whidbey Island, just an hour north of Seattle. Enjoy an early bird registration discount through April 25.
Full details at blueearth.org.
Multimedia workshop: The High Ridge
Our friends at North Cascades Institute have been connecting people, nature and community for 25 years. This fall, we helped them to celebrate this milestone by leading a hands-on multimedia workshop. They just launched a brand-new website with the video we created at that workshop, The High Ridge: Celebrating 25 years in the North Cascades.
When the Institute first approached us about creating a story for their 25th anniversary, they didn’t necessarily have a workshop in mind. But the more we discussed the project – along with the organization’s expanding needs, staff interest and new website – building in-house capacity to produce videos and multimedia made the most sense.
The workshop took place over five days on Canoe Island in the San Juans. In the months leading up to our week together, three Institute staff members – Amy, Christian and Jessica – purchased a video camera and learned how to use it, conducted a dozen interviews, transcribed them into more than 60,000 words, and sorted through archival footage.
We spent Monday setting up workstations, reviewing transcripts, identifying major themes and a story outline, and sharing relevant examples. The next morning we got out our highlighters and scissors, identified relevant quotes from the transcripts and sorted them by theme: in this case, where did we come from and why does our work matter? We chose passages that most efficiently communicated this message and sequenced them into a rough paper edit. This took most of the day.
We decided to use this cut-and-sort approach because of the large amount of source material, and because it allowed multiple people to work on the transcript at one time. This is the same process that I use at home, except that rather than physically cut apart my transcripts, I usually copy and paste them into a document. We always create a paper edit before we begin to work in Final Cut.
With the paper edit complete, piecing the audio together moved relatively quickly. I should mention that this was our first time using Final Cut X, and Benj and I have since decided to integrate the program into our own workflow. Once we had what I refer to as a “radio edit,” the group gave it a listen and made a list of changes.
On Thursday, I worked with Amy to finalize the radio edit, while Christian and Benj began placing video and sequencing visuals that Jessica provided from the Institute’s extensive archive. This work continued late into the night. Friday, we watched a draft of the video and made a list of changes. We quit just in time to paddle a kayak around the island.
Amy, Christian and Jessica returned to the Institute and finished sequencing visuals and filling holes. We spent one more day together, learning about color correction, titles, compression and putting on the final touches.
We hope you’ll watch The High Ridge, and join North Cascades Institute in celebrating their next 25 years in the North Cascades.
The First Optometrists
Joel de Melo Bambamba and Suzete Guina are studying to become two of Mozambique’s first optometrists. After a series of civil wars left their country one of the poorest in the world, the population of almost 24 million is just beginning to recover. Yet, there are zero optometrists in Mozambique, and poverty and blindness are inextricable.
The Mozambique Eyecare Project aims to provide a sustainable solution to the problem of avoidable blindness through optometric education. There are 56 students enrolled in the project, thanks to a partnership between the Dublin Institute of Technology, Lúrio Univeristy in Mozambique and the International Centre for Eyecare Education.
This past spring, we spent two weeks in Mozambique to tell the story of Joel and Suzete and the project’s work at UniLúrio. We built an image library, a 10-minute video and a new website, mozeyecare.org, all launched for World Site Day. Our frequent collaborator Darin Reid did the design and built the multi-language site on WordPress. And a big thanks to the amazingly agile Nick Drummond who wrote and recorded most of the music in the piece.
Mozambique is one of five Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa, and as such, is somewhat disadvantaged when it comes to foreign aid. In fact, the optometry faculty at Uniúrio are all Spanish speakers because it has been difficult to find Portuguese or Brazilian staff. The similarities between Portuguese and Spanish also made our job significantly easier as Sara was able to communicate with almost everyone in Spanish.
A few behind-the-scenes photographs are below. Explore the “Stories” on mozeyecare.org to view more images from the project.
The Faces of TEAM
In April, we traveled to Tanzania to document a workshop and training for tropical ecologists. TEAM (Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring) is a Conservation International project designed to provide an early warning system on the status of biodiversity and climate change in the tropics. The network generates real time, publicly available data through a rapidly growing global network of field stations. We wrote about one component of our work upon our return last May. Today, we can share the magazine we produced during our week in Dar es Salaam.
TEAM currently has 18 site managers from tropical forests in 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This diverse group of scientists gathered in Dar to network, train and solve shared challenges from their home sites. Similar to the Natural Histories Project, our job was to find a way to bring this group of voices to a wider audience.
Over a few days, we completed short interviews with each site manager along with a high-key portrait. We pulled quotes from each that, when read together, help explain the researchers’ work and why it’s important. The issues TEAM is tackling are serious and the data significant, but it’s the dedication and passion of the people in the network that makes the project compelling.
The resulting piece, The Faces of TEAM, is distributed as a printed-on-demand magazine (order here) and an iPad-optimized PDF.
Excerpts below:
PATRICIA ALVAREZ
“Your days can go really crappy. Trust me. I got this scar here. I’ve been stung by a sting ray, a scorpion… You can have a really, really crappy day. You lost a boat. Your gasoline was taken by the river. It’s raining. Your tent is invaded by ants. You have the worst day of your life and you’re ready to cry and say I hate this place. I hate the jungle. They should burn the jungle and put cement on it. I’ve said it. And then you see this little monkey looking at you. It can be a little frog, it can be a fungi that I’ve never seen in my life. And that’s it. That’s the magic of Cashu.”
DAVID KENFACK
“The most exciting for me is the camera traps. The camera trap data is going to be very important for the management plan of the park because so far there is no clear picture of what is in the park as far as animals. Sometimes when we go to town we have encounters with elephants, but we don’t know how many elephants are there. We don’t know where they are. So with the camera trap studies we are going to have a better understanding of what is in the park, where it is, how dynamic the population is and so on. It’s also important for the entire country because it’s going to set an example for how to monitor wildlife. I think it’s the first time that this type of equipment has been used in Cameroon.”
BADRU MUGERWA
“I find it amazing that a small group of people came up with this idea. Now it has grown to a global scale and it’s an honor to be part of this network. It’s already part of the team vision, expanding more, having 40 sites. So I think my work is to keep it going. It’s not all about collecting data for a PhD study over three years and then keeping your data on a shelf. We need something long-term going on, and data shared on a global scale, just the way TEAM does it.
I think if we’re going to help other life survive, regardless of all the threats we are facing, it has to be a joint collaboration. We have to join hands to help other species to live, to continue existing.”
On the outside
A short, uplifting postscript on our Connecting Prisons with Nature video we produced two years ago for the Sustainable Prisons Project:
Daniel Travatte, the bee-keeping inmate, was recently profiled in the Kitsap Sun. He was released from prison last June and is now raising 70,000 bees professionally. Read the full story at the Kitsap Sun.
The captive-rearing program for the Oregon-spotted frog continues to exceed expectations. Earlier this year, egg nests were found at the release site, indicating that the frogs had survived and were beginning to reproduce in the wild. Last week, 163 new frogs were taken to Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Harry Greer was able release the frogs himself. Harry, an inmate who has worked on the project since its inception, is now on work release. Read more on the SPP Blog.
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