Play in the Gray is about to take flight …. and we need you. Did you suggest our Facebook page to your friends? Is there someone you know we should meet? Do you want to volunteer for our Boston outreach team? Write me!

STATUS UPDATE:

Kaitlin is calling festivals and continuing applications. Since January we have applied to over 50 festivals, and have been accepted to six. If this number sounds low remember that we applied to some of the most elite festivals in the world. We still have applications pending. Stay tuned for screening announcements.

“Play in the Gray” is fit for mainstream programs. Our world-premiere is Saturday, April 17th, with a second screening the 19th at the Atlanta Film Festival. On April 23rd we hit the Indie Spirit Film Festival in Colorado Springs. We are also proud to announce that we were invited (through referral from a German festival) to the queer festival in Cambodia! This is only the beginning. Hello, world.

BUZZZZZZZZ:

I’m busy building audience and I need your help. Anything we post, please repost so all of your friends know. We want Play in the Gray news in the constant peripheral vision of the public at large.

Are you our fan on Facebook? http://www.facebook.com/pages/Play-in-the-Gray/113885766922?ref=ts

Are you a follower on Twitter? http://twitter.com/playinthegray

ATLANTA: Three crew members, one board member, and four troupe members are banding together to make our world-premiere explosive. The advocacy group Georgia Equality is blasting 2,500 people in the Greater Atlanta area. The Lesbian Health Initiative is organizing a welcoming committee. Various other community organizations are coming out to celebrate Play in the Gray. We are being met with generosity, and it’s going to be a blast.

Do you know anyone in Atlanta? Is it an audience member? A group? A reporter? A cool coffee shop to put fliers? Bring it on.

INDIE SPIRIT, Colorado Springs: This is a small that festival will offer excellent access to other filmmakers, festival staff, and industry people. Kaitlin and I are going to represent. We don’t have a coalition there yet, so please pass along ideas. I’m starting outreach now. It will be our Rocky Mountain Premiere.

BOSTON: We promise, details soon. When it happens we want everyone there in full force. The entire cast and crew are Boston-based. We want it to be memorable and celebratory.

We hope we will set a precedent with these three screenings.

We are already receiving praise.

“Play in the Gray does precisely what we need art to do: provoke us to see the familiar in new ways,” said Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, founder of the Progressive Project. “The issue of LGBT rights is all over the news, but discourse on the subject is often polarized and locked in old, familiar scripts. Play in the Gray will take you brazenly, fabulously off-script, showing queer lives with depth, candor, and humor.”

As Gunner Scott of the Mass Transgender Political Coalition said, “Play in the Gray will push viewers to experience the enormity of gender.”

Please share your comments!

FUNDRAISING:

Play in the Gray is a documentary that brings out people and starts conversation. We hope these efforts result in invitations to other festivals, screenings, and opportunities for distribution.

This film was made through generosity of individuals. Donors at our January fundraising event made Atlanta possible. We are working to sell 75 t-shirts before Atlanta, and we have 40 more to hit that goal. You know you want one: http://playinthegray.com/donate/index.html

Please write if you are able to host a private house party with your friends and family. If you can raise $1,000 or more we will come with 3 scenes from the film and do a Q&A. If you can raise $3,000 we will screen the entire film for your private audience. Your donation, and the donations of your friends, is what will keep us going.

At the end of the film when the lights come on we want Play in the Gray to go beyond individual change. Help us keep plugging into local community networks and pushing for social change.

See you there! And let’s talk sooner. Thanks for telling everyone that Play in the Gray is coming to a city near you.

Many thanks,

Danielle Connor

Our previous work with smartMeme to produce “The Copenhagen Moment” helped them secure funding for travel to Copenhagen to support climate justice actions. So before they left, we made a plan to support their media production needs from afar. We equipped Doyle with a FlipCam, and a FTP site to upload footage.

While Doyle is a trained story teller with vast experience conveying the emotional significance of political actions, she has had little practical experience shooting video. We warned her what not to do:

ROAMING CAMERA: This is not your uncle’s home video. Keep the camera steady! Hold your shots and keep the camera movement to a minimum.

GARBLED AUDIO:  Audio is more important than video. I’ll say it again, audio is more important than video. If your audience can’t hear what’s going on, they’ll will tune out and move on. The solution with the FlipCam: keep the camera close to your sound source, within 5 feet to be exact.

THIS AINT CSPAN: They have the market on boring and we are not going to try to compete with them. Shoot exciting and interesting visuals – marching, confronting the authorities, beautiful signs, big banners, musicians, puppets, drummers, etc. SHOW your audience how awesome and powerful the action was and give your editor something to work with.

As the footage rolled in, it felt like we were entering a new and exciting space using technology to support activism. They were uploading, and we were turning edits around in 24 – 48 hours. The videos were posted to Pitch Engine to help frame the conversation in Indigenous Rights for the mainstream media.

Approaching COP15, NGO’s were pouring money into video crews so that they could be prepared to show the world what they were seeing. This, of course, leaves the funded groups with louder voices – and a better chance of getting their message picked up by the mainstream media. But, as our work with the Indigenous Environmental Network and smartMeme shows, with a little training, good collaboration and some simple tools, all groups – even those on tight budget – can amplify their own voices and tell their own story.

-Justin

The diesel footage in “Sidewalk to Senator” is close to my heart because I love working with youth, and I’m passionate about popular education. They shot most of this footage on either a hand-held digital camera or a small Panasonic camcorder. On the day of our big Earth Day Lobby Action, we sent a version of this footage to the State House, and in just a few hours it had over 250 hits – so even though it didn’t “go viral”, it reached our target audience. Legislative staff recognized the coalition when we arrived and knew we were there to demand clean air.

“Lead in Toys” was a little bit different. The Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow has an active online base. A version of this video was released when the campaign was pressuring DPH to ban lead in toys and children’s jewelry. It went out as part of an action alert email, and had 2,500 hits within 72 hours. The reason I felt it was important to document this moment is because the XRF meter used to detect lead in toys is very expensive, and Clean Water had it on loan for just a brief period. With one simple video, we could reach the entire base with pressing information that helped persuade them to sign an online petition charted to reach the DPH Commissioner a few days later. And we had a compelling visual that proved lead is in the least likely places.

It was during this work I realized that my greatest excitement came from bringing campaign stories alive – and developing strategic uses for video to make an impact on power structures.

- danielle

Little did we know that the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA has one of the only rear projection systems in the world. Before the theater was used for movies it was a performance house. The new owners didn’t want to tear out the gorgeous balcony seats, so they used the same projection method cruise ships were using and made use of the back-stage space.

The Brattle shows rare and classic films, with a real-live projectionist tiptoeing around back there to change the reels when necessary. They are always in need of support and have great deals for membership running until the end of the year. FYI – they have donors matching any membership revenue brought in by the end of 2009, so you can double your money so to speak.

We watched La Danse, Fred Wiseman’s latest documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet (video projection). Sitting in the second row, hearing every foot squeak on the floor as the dancers bounced and contorted their bodies in unheard of fashions, I grew intensely aware of the personal dedication it takes to perform at their level. With their fearless queen artistic director at the helm, Wiseman revealed an institution not just holding its place in the classical sense, but reflecting notions of current popular culture.

With no text, soundtrack music, frequent cuts, interviews, or any character development beyond the organization as a collective, at the end of 2.5 hours La Danse left me feeling wowed liked I’d experienced the Paris Opera Ballet.

- danielle

Saturday October 10, 2009: The fourth annual HONK Festival brought together activist street bands from around the world to celebrate the power of making noise in Somerville, MA. Brisk, sunny, fall weather – I set out in Davis Square to capture HONK as an exploration of sound with my Olympus LS-10 audio recorder. Interviewing bands about the relationship between activism and street music, I found a range of responses from a-political artists who oppose categorization to players with very specific peace and justice commitments.

The imaginary wall between performer and audience doesn’t exist at HONK. Crowds freely interact with the bands who are playing simultaneously around the city in allies, squares and parks.

When the little girl featured here was gearing up to give her dollar, I busted out my iPhone and used the video function for the first time. Though the scene was too loud to get decent audio through the iPhone (with no control over the levels), the pocket-cam is matched with more stable sound from my LS-10 recording.

-danielle

Here are two of the latest pieces that we’ve produced for ExtremeInequality.org. The developers of the site, The Working Group on Extreme Inequality (a joint project between the Institute for Policy Studies and United for Fair Economy) contracted with us to work with them on this new social-issue video blog. Its an exciting project and an interesting use of online video – popular education and organizing. In March of 2009, we launched a Youtube channel for them and consulted on online distribution.

Justin partnered with smartMeme to produce this short fundraising piece for the release of their resource guide, “Re: Imagining Change”. He shot two trainings and three short interviews, completing the story by mining their extensive archive of audio recordings and still photos. smartMeme distributed the video on Facebook, and the video-tagging function helped them reach their target audience in ways that YouTube couldn’t. Fellow activist and supporters forwarded the video to their Facebook friends and downloaded thousands of copies of smartMeme’s strategy manual: “Re: Imagining Change”. http://smartmeme.org/change

In the spring of this 2008, the video was featured in an exhibit in Rhode Island entitled Experiencing the War in Iraq. The show ran in two galleries in Pawtucket, and the curators, ReconnectUS, organized a series of events for 3/19/08 to mark the fifth anniversary of the US invasion.

Nan Levinson of the Boston Globe featured “Readings from Re-Making Sense -The Warrior Writers Project” in her article about ReconnectUS.

Read the full article here:

http://www.justinfrancese.com/blog/globe_warrior_writers.pdf

Cloy Richards, Aaron Hughes, and Drew Cameron of Iraq Veterans Against the War read their writings from “Remaking Sense”. The book is a compilation created through a series of writing workshops designed by IVAW members.

This was a public reading held at the Green Door Studio in Burlington, VT. The event also included an art opening and two hours of readings from veterans from all over the country.

Justin co-produced this with Deb Ellis as pro-bono project in support of the Warrior Writers Project. please visit www.warriorwriters.org.

WEX trains educators across the country to “raise students’ test scores, develop teachers’ skills, and ensure that all children leave school with the power to make the world want to hear what they have to say.” http://www.wex.com

Video has become an essential tool for the Writer’s Express. Since 2007, Justin has been collaborating with the Writer’s Express to create short documentary-style training videos for presentations and web-based instruction. He has captured teachers using the WEX method in their classrooms and WEX trainers training the teachers. The footage has been critical in WEX’s efforts to reach multiple training and marketing goals. Ultimately, the videos we produced will be part of an innovative online training platform to help teachers across country get access to the WEX method.

This clip is one sample from the video library that we created for WEX as a training resource. The clips offer a new window into the classroom and provide real world examples to help new WEX teachers see how the curriculum is being applied and to inspire them to take the curriculum into their own classrooms.

smartMeme co-director Patrick Reinsborough walked into the Movement Generation teach-in, looked up on the screen and saw “The Copenhagen Moment” playing. Websites are posting the video, and bloggers keep referencing it. The reposts indicate, “The Copenhagen Moment” is influencing our cultural narrative surrounding climate change.

“smartMeme wants to reach people working on ecological and social justice issues with a message about the big picture of climate change,” says Doyle Canning, co-director. “We want to change the dominant story and be part of a new story of ecological justice.”

Showcasing some of the nations top climate justice activists, “The Copenhagen Moment” is the product of a three-day conference in July 2009. Rough Mountain Studios supports smartMeme to multi-purpose footage from this meeting of minds into a portfolio of educational videos.