This is a great little film discussing how to use more sustainable practices in eating seafood. Its a good complement to our dossier on the struggle of small-scale and native fishing on the east coast (check it out - “united we fish“)
Its done by Faircompanies community. a wonderful resource on sustainable practices & info.
Category : Uncategorized
A new set of short film clips are up on the main site. This month, Martha Steigman explores a conflict between small-scale fisheries in Eastern Canada and corporate and governmental interests.
Category : Uncategorized
“So many of the problems that wikis face are not problems that money can solve. Most of our problems are related to building a large community and having a lot of quality content - and these are things that money can’t help.” - Evangelo Prodromou, founder, wikiTravel
I’m at RoCoCoCamp Montreal today where everyone is talking about wiki culture and best practices all day. All the usual suspects from Montreal are here: Brett, Hugh, Patrick, Simon as well as some prominent members of the wiki community at large - including the founders of wikiTravel and wikiHow.
This morning I attended a session on the semantic web, and wiki evangelism (Have you ever tried to get someone to use a wiki that didn’t want to? It’s not easy).
The whole conference is being documented on video - and edited, not surprisingly, on a wiki. We’ll have the film available on the site when it’s ready. Photos coming soon - I forgot my darn camera cable at home.
UPDATE: Photos now up on our Flickr page - or check out all the RococoCamp photos here.
Category : Uncategorized
There’s a profile of the British graffiti artist, Banksy, in the New Yorker this week. It’s a very engaging piece about a guy who stencils rats on buildings one day and sells his art at Sotheby’s for half a million dollars the next.
Banksy surfaces from time to time to prod the popular conscience. Confronted with a blank surface, he will cover it with scenes of anti-authoritarian whimsy: Winston Churchill with a Mohawk, two policemen kissing, a military helicopter crowned by a pink bow.
[Link]
Related stuff:
Roadsworth: Montreal graffiti artist
Category : Uncategorized
Back in 2002 I started doing media education workshops for a youth media arts project here in Toronto. As I looked around the room, 80% of the participants were young men and eager to get started making their videos, radio shows, and photographs. Masculinity, as a topic, validated most of the group’s experience and also fed my curiosity about how personal stories connect to the larger culture, especially my own. Masculinity also leveled some of the projects’ power imbalances since I was learning alongside the young men and women.
Several other sources of inspiration also came up that year; my parents divorced, I had a traumatic break-up with my girlfriend, cultural analyst bell hooks published The Will to Change: men, masculinity and love, Jackson Katz presented a video called Tough Guise: violence, media, and the crisis in masculinity, and the start of the U.S. war on Iraq was soaked in male ego, aggression, and casualties.
Fast forward. In 2005 I was working as a personal support worker for a man living with autism and cerebral palsy and also working on various media education projects. I continued to digest the events of 2002 and decided to make a video about masculinity and apply for a small grant from the Ontario Arts Council. Similar to my approach as an educator, my artistic practice also starts with validating where I am in time, in a moment of economic and social affects. I contacted all of the men I knew who worked as support workers and since most support workers are women, my total was about 15. While many men were too busy or just too ironically shy to talk about vulnerability on camera, I managed to make 6 men comfortable enough with the idea to start asking questions.
After viewing and re-viewing over 8 hours of footage and making notes on over 100 post-it notes, the video was eventually structured around three central questions: What does vulnerability feel like? What barriers keep men from being more vulnerable? How does a lack of vulnerability affect men’s relationship with others and themselves?
Shoulder to Shoulder as well as more individual challenges about strength, fear, shame, silence, and self-esteem.
The commanding image of the video is water, an element usually associated with the feminine. Different states of water reflect the emotional world of male vulnerability. These images are shared with head-and-shoulder shots of the men in a split screen effect.
Find out more at Paul Baines’ website MediaMindful.ca
Category : Uncategorized
Thought I would plug this open call put out by the NFB. It’s a great opportunity for anyone involved in production for mobile or broadband delivery.
Deadline is coming up soon, so if this is your kinda thing…dont delay!
Here’s the deal:
The NFB CROSS-MEDIA CHALLENGE is a co-production competition for innovative, interactive, socially engaged content with applications for mobile and broadband. It will award one Canadian producer a $10,000 co-production development deal with the NFB. Deadline for applications is Friday, May 11 , 2007. The winner will be announced at the Banff World Television Festival, June 11-14, 2007.
ABOUT THE CHALLENGE
Inspired by the National Film Board’s legendary Challenge for Change program of community filmmaking, today’s NFB is adapting the adage of “think globally, act locally” to develop socially engaged media projects relating to issues such as the protection of the environment (global warming), health care, human rights, poverty and violence against women.How can we inspire an exchange of story-telling practices among diverse communities? How can we foster a national dialogue on issues that have local roots by the creative use of media? How can we unleash creative talents of marginal voices and communities and make them heard?
We are interested in projects that use the versatility, mobility and borderless nature of new platforms to enable communities to talk to each other. Projects can be any genre: documentary, animation, drama or hybrid variants of these.
Eligible projects must be cross-platform and multi-platform involving the best features of each media to ensure maximum audience participation. Projects should take full advantage of the range of new platforms, with a particular emphasis on on-line, interactive and mobile. Projects must demonstrate direct contact and interaction with Canadian communities as part of the development plan.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
Your three page proposal should provide a succinct overview of your project, a development plan and development budget summary along with any supporting audio-visual material. To be eligible, proposals must be received by 5:00 pm (Eastern Time Zone) Friday May 11 , 2007Proposals (including your full name and address) should be submitted to:
Elena Villegas
Programming and Reporting Coordinator
e.villegas [at] nfb [dot] ca3155 Côte de Liesse Road
St. Laurent, Quebec H4N 2N4The winning project will be announced the Banff World Television Festival (June 11-14, 2007).
For more information, visit www.nfb.ca/crossmediachallenge.
Category : Uncategorized
Updates from the basement, courtesy of the CITIZENShift team.
Eve B. St-CyrMontrealer in her mid-twenties. Freelance journalist and photographer, with an interest in human rights and sustainable living. Has a cheerful disposition.
KathleenKathleen Jayme is a film production student at the University of British Columbia and is currently interning at CITIZENShift in Vancouver.
Laura GlowackiFrom Winnipeg, I now live and study in Montreal. I really, really like sci fi television and tobaggonning. I intern here at CitizenShift.
ryanRyan Spence is a Montreal based filmmaker/editor working primarily in documentary and independent fiction.
timTim McSorley is CITIZENShift's podcast coordinator and freelance journalist. He's also a contributor to CKUT radio and The Dominion newspaper.
TyneshaTynesha is CITIZENShift's summer intern from Concordia University's Communication department (Mtl., QC). Brimming with interests, she states "I enjoy school, I sing in a choir and I am also involved in community radio and volunteer work with youth. In the future, I look forward to developing a company that merges my three great passions in sound, community engagement, and music."
widgeDavid Widgington was the event coordinator for the Citizen Media Rendez-vous 2010 (http://citizen-media.ca). He is a mobile journalist (MoJo) who is well-versed in community radio, video and print and web-based media practices. He has a particular interest these days with diaspora communities returning to Southern Sudan since the end of the war. He is script-writing a documentary project on the subject. (http://southsudaninfo.net).
