WeRobotics and the Power of Local

What is the Power of Local? Good question. 

We recently had the good fortune of working with the non-profit WeRobotics. They came to us via our dear friend and fellow filmmaker, Beth Cohen (check her out, she rocks!). WeRobotics is a kick-ass organization that works with the Global South (that’s all the countries south of the equator to you and me) to train local experts and supply them with drones and other nifty tech to help them solve agricultural, waste-management, and disaster relief issues.

They truly are a spiffy organization bringing inclusion and equality to the Global South and we worked with co-founder and overall amazing human Sonja Betschart. 

For this project, Sonja wanted us to create a film that succinctly expressed the power of local. Of course, our first question was, what is the power of local? Sonja explained that the core concept is one of training local humans to gather data and then use that data for good. Specifically, they train young people to use drones, AI and other tech to collect data about things as diverse as mosquito populations and landfill boundaries. Once the data is collected, they use it to enable change, from government policy to business development. By creating local experts who can work with local data locally, they accelerate positive change in communities across the global south. That is the power of local. 

So how do we capture this concept in a fun, fast, exciting and ultimately informative way? We work with the local experts. In fact, we help them become filmmakers and tell their own story. 

We asked WeRobotics Flying Lab (that’s what the locations are called) leaders across the planet to tell us what the power of local meant to them. We used those stories to write a script. And then we asked everyone to become a filmmaker. We received a lot of honest, raw video footage that spanned the globe from the mountains of northern India to the greenscreens of Peru. Lots of it in their native languages and expressing what the Power of Local meant to them. 

The video that resulted from this process is honest and delightful and expresses, we believe, the power of local in the voice of the people who live it every day.

Ultimately, this is a project that fell very near and dear to Daniel and Mark’s hearts due to the clear and profound impact the organization and its members are having on their local communities and the world. We very much look forward to continuing to find ways to help spread their message and goodwill.

Goodfocus adds experience and good looks with two new partners

This is an auspicious week in Goodfocus-world. We have brought two new partners into the production company, Mark F. Booker and Nancy E. Steiner. Their arrival creates a more well-rounded, full-service production team able to take on larger and more nuanced projects. And, ultimately, their alliance challenges the supremacy of the Klingons in the outer reaches of Federation space¹.

Mark Booker has collaborated with Goodfocus and its founder Daniel Stephens for the better part of two decades but this announcement makes it official. Like Daniel, Mark is an award-winning producer and writer but also has made a name for himself as an accomplished actor. He hails from Nebraska where he lives with his wife, Jamie, and their two daughters. All of whom he adores.

Nancy has worked with Goodfocus for the last five years as both a producer and director. She is a Peabody Award winning director/ producer of documentary one- off films and multi-part series. Her work has appeared on HBO, CNN, NBC and CBS, PBS and BRAVO. Before working in documentary television, Nancy was a producer at NBC News for Today, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and Sunday Today. Nancy is married to David Michaelis, a writer, and lives in Bedford, New York with a blended family of five children, two dogs, an iguana, and a pig².

The new Goodfocus team is already hard at work developing the series 26 Words (a quirky etymology based kid’s show), as well as a dramatic series centered around JPL’s Voyager spacecraft, Pale Blue Dot. They continue their social justice/impact work with organizations such as the World Bank, the Red Cross and WeRobotics.

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NOTES

1. This is, in fact, not true, as we are well aware that the Klingon hold in the outer reaches of Federation space is quite strong. Unless, of course, you are referring to the Next Generation timeline, in which case the Klingons are our friends.

2. These are only the animals we are aware of. There may be more (including a tika cat³).

3. The Tika Cat is a well-known Klingon animal living in Klingon space.

Project Completeness

It's a sublime delight when a good project finds itself in a state of completedness. Here in the world of goodfocus, we've been working almost non-stop on a project in conjunction with Cross River Productions of New York (the big city, to you and me) and the Council on Foreign Relations, also based in New York.

To say that this project has completely consumed us for the past 8 months is, quite frankly, putting it lightly. Our days and nights and all the bits in-betwixt (and there are bits in-betwixt if you look closely for them; like finding a plethora of change beneath the cushions of a well-loved couch) have been filled to overflowing with filming interviews, paper edits, online edits, music composition, graphics creation and phone conversations about such diverse topics as whether the Isle of Man is a NATO member and what is the precise boundary of the Golan Heights. We have selected scores upon scores (that's several hundred) photos from the Reuters archive to overlay into the final set of films, debated whether a specific image is too graphic, not graphic enough, too biased, not biased enough, accurately depicting the region being discussed by the interview subject, and on and on.

It has been a project of precision and accuracy (thank you Mr. Malone for teaching me the difference). It has been a project of honing and pairing down. It has been a project of completeness. And now, it is complete. And now the world feels just a little strange. Gone are the mornings of rushing into the office to continue choosing images for a film about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, or Interrogation Techniques, or Drones in Pakistan. Gone are late evenings of color-grading or map-making. Gone are the afternoons of listening again and again to the same segment of a film to make sure it truly says what is intended. Again and again. This became normal.

And now it's time to find a new normal. Now it's time to enjoy the feeling of a project completed, a job well done and the gift of new friendships garnered through the process.

And perhaps it's also time to be grateful for time.

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The Council on Foreign Relations is an amazing, independent think tank founded in 1921. To learn more about the organization and the work they do, please visit www.cfr.org.

Editing preparedness

It's late Sunday night, early Monday morning and while sleep would be a natural enterprise in which to be currently engaged, it seems to be fleeting at the moment, thus, a blog entry.

Tomorrow (well, technically today), we begin preparing the studio for a four week editing session for the musician documentary we have been working on over the last year. It would be lovely to state the name of said musician, but we've been kindly asked to refrain from doing so. 

Our preparations include organizing the over four (4) terabytes of footage we've acquired over the last twelve (12) months (that's 300GB/month to you and me) into easily accessible, well-tagged batches (technically folders and files with a pile of meta-data attached) and having the last four or five interviews transcribed. There will also be a passel of audio-syncing to complete as a number of our filming escapades involved multiple cameras and double-system sound - though it's a tedious process, it's actually one I find quite meditative. Though I wonder if Brian, who will actually be doing the audio-syncing, will find it so. 

Once the project is prepared for editing we'll have a spate of long, fun, quirk-filled, idea-tossing (and did I say long) meetings to discuss a general structure for the film and identify its specific theme set and feel. Actually, much of that was done at the start of the project and with the mid-project production of a rough-cut, but it's good to do this step on a regular basis as sometimes these bits shift during production and identifying that shift and incorporating it into the finished film is often a good thing. And sometimes simply necessary.

Let the preparations begin! Well, let them begin tomorrow (today) after a bit of rest.