Common Ground

We were fortunate enough to travel to New Orleans to work on a series of videos for Common Ground Relief, one of the toughest and most dependable advocates for residents of the lower ninth ward. My experience was amazing… both inspiring and devastating. I spent a few mornings walking along the famous levee that burst down through the still unpaved roads out into the neighborhood, with house after house that still lie in complete ruin.. In the beginning I think the story of Katrina (told amazingly in many films and videos) was moving to almost everyone in our country.

The sad truth is that in our culture, stories have a shelf life. And it’s getting shorter every day. Today everyone knows what happened during Katrina and no matter how outraged you were at the government’s response, you’ve moved on. Unfortunately the battle continues for those who are trying to rebuild their community. It’s a challenge to retell such an already saturated story.. but it needs to be retold.

In this video we tried to mix outrage with hope… but most importantly we just tried to let the images tell the truth. New Orleans is still very much a broken place. Common Ground is one of the few organizations that I’ve encountered which is truly grassroots. It arose a day after Katrina from the wreckage and has endured and grown through out the rebuilding process. Today it’s a well led, practical and productive organization. If you want to reconnect with this important piece of our national history, I strongly recommend a volunteer trip to common ground. It certainly reawakened our desire to see New Orleans get the attention, compassion and resources it needs to become whole again.

Video & Website: A Family Reunion

I’m always struck by a website that has great video content…. 5 pages deep. Is a video really that good if I have to click 5 times to find it? It seems like far too often video is held at arms length when it comes to integration into a website. But it’s not just because we spend so much time in the edit room that we want videos to be front in center on an organizations website, we really think it makes a difference.

Video is wonderful at providing that visceral and emotional impact necessary to engage anyone in a social cause. That visual punch works best if it’s up front where it can capture people and pull them into the text, links and other images that make up a truly useful tapestry of content. My favorite example of this is The Girl Effect, a website that so seamlessly incorporates video that you don’t even notice when you’re watching the video and when you’re visiting the website. With this level of integration you start to enhance the power of a video and consequently the rest of the site.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that spreading video throughout a website is an amazing way to bring things to life. Not every page has to contain a slickly edited piece, but simply having that visual reference in every area is powerful. Now you’re not only providing content for the visual learners out there (those who learn through reading) but also for the auditory learners too (those who learn through listening and watching). One of our clients provides a clear and powerful example of this. The Urban Justice Center not only put their video in the center of their homepage but took little snippets about each of their projects and put them on the project pages. All of a sudden the site has faces and voices and that elusive quality of “people” that can evade us when we let video and websites remain distant cousins.

The Many Faces of Online Video

A friend of mine in a graduate program at Tufts sent me an amazing YouTube video the other day with the warning "Tufts is now accepting video submissions as part of their application process."

As a "video professional," I watched it immediately and thought: what an interesting new frontier for video to tackle! In this video, an eager student combines her two favorite things ("being a nerd and dancing") and creates dances to demonstrate different types of graphs.  Let me remind you that this is an optional part of the application, so I was pretty impressed to see such a huge following (already 67,000 hits on YouTube!) It's by no means flashy, HD and picture perfect, but it is concise and creative.  We all saw Elle Woods' video submission for admission to Harvard in Legally Blonde, and I think since then this tactic has been generally considered comical, ridiculous and perhaps even a tad futuristic. But how exciting to think that online video will now have a place in the dreaded college admissions discussion! "For Tufts," says a New York Times article that followed the video submissions, "the videos have been a delightful way to get to know the applicants." In a sea of test scores, essays, short answers, GPA's, and transcripts, video has become a legitimate tool for students to better showcase their personality. Lee Coffin, the director of undergraduate admissions at Tufts University, said "We have a lot of information about applicants, but the videos let them share their voice.”

It's my theory that the prevalence of online video clearly and directly benefits the work we do at Good Eye Video, and I can't think of a better way to demonstrate that point than this Tufts example. Video is no longer something unattainable or futuristic. It is quickly becoming a fundamental part of the both the online and "real world" dialogue. Whether you make videos on your cell phone or re-tweet about a new YouTube video, you encourage the widespread acceptance of video as a medium for communication. So, props to Tufts for trying something new and including video in that experiment!

Good Eye Video visits Barnard!

My new role at Good Eye Video has encouraged me to get back in touch with some of the organizations that have mattered most to me in my personal and professional journey. At the very top of that list is Barnard College, and we had the pleasure of creating a couple of videos documenting the opening of The Diana Center, a brand new, state-of-the-art student building on Barnard's campus, complete with classrooms, event space, study space and a even a green roof.  I've posted the first video below, which details the student reaction to the opening of the brand new Diana Center.  It has been wonderful to be back on campus and back in touch with the Barnard community.  Stay tuned for the Ribbon Cutting!