Nalaka Gunawardene

Money is not an issue: ‘No budget’ films have their own festival

After over a decade working in television and film, most of that time commissioning new content from independent producers or creating content ourselves, I have yet to come across a film-maker who had enough budget.

We’re are all used to getting by with less than ideal budgets.

Some more than others, though: there are low budget films, and then there are ‘no budget’ films.

A few idealists among us still believe money is not an issue in cultural expression.

They now have their own festival, unashamedly for just that kind of films: No Budget VideoFilmfestival, Heilbronn / Weimar & Tour 2007
No budget video film festival

Their self-intro reads:

In 2007 the „Geld spielt keine Rolle“ (“money is not an issue””it’s only money”) VideoFilmfestival will start a series of events during an independent art-, film- and musicfestival in Heilbronn. From the 8th to 10th of June 2007 it will be in Heilbronn, and thereafter will be ample opportunity to screen the films in Weimar (at the Lichthaus Kino in summer 2007), Magdeburg, London and other cities. The previous festival was carried by the faculty of media of the Bauhaus- University Weimar and took place in Weimar in May 2006.

Filmmakers characterized by creativity and idealism get the opportunity to present their films to a wide audience.
For the audience this promises good films which possibly fall through the cracks of commerce.

Remember: deadline for entries is 1 May 2007.

The festival is being organised by a group of German film enthusiasists calling themselves the film sharing community.

Under the topic GELD SPIELT KEINE ROLLE (Money is no issue) the film sharing community wants to provide a platform for productions of moderate means achieving remarkable outputs and meaningful films on a shoestring.

May their tribe increase!

Science journalism, key to good governance

From Sydney, I have travelled to Melbourne to participate in the Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists, from 16 to 20 April 2007.

It’s the second time a science communication event brings me to this beautiful, multi-cultural Australian city. My first visit was in November 1996 to speak at SCICOMM ’96, the Fourth International Conference on the Public Understanding of Science and Technology, held at the University of Melbourne.

This week’s conference is promising to be interesting and engaging. The programme is full of talks, panels, debates and other activities. Several hundred fellow science journalists, and those researching or supporting science journalism, are expected to attend.

I’ll be kept busy being on two separate panels.

David Dickson, Director of the Science and Development Network (SciDev.Net), has just written an editorial that provides an excellent backdrop to the conference. He argues that the work of science journalists needs greater recognition as an essential precondition for transparent, responsive and accountable government.

Excerpts:

Much will be heard and discussed about how science journalists can inform — and, frequently, entertain — people with stories about scientific and technological developments. Equally important is their role in stimulating public debate in areas where science and technology can impact directly on the social and natural worlds, from stem cell research to global warming.

At the heart of many of these issues lies the key contribution that journalism can make to good governance. The concept of the journalist as a defender of the public interest is usually applied to those writing about overtly political issues, since it is here that the need for — and indeed the challenges to — a free press are often greatest.

But a growing number of political decisions, from allocating medical resources to promoting economic growth, have a scientific and technological dimension to them. It is therefore important to recognise the extent to which science journalism forms an essential component of a well-functioning democracy.
Read the full editorial on SciDev.Net website

Unfortunately, David is not able to join us in person — he’s holed up in London, finalising the organisation’s new five-year strategy.

Note:
I’m flying twin flags at this conference – as the Director of TVE Asia Pacific, and as a Trustee of SciDev.Net

I plan to be posting on to this personal blog as well as to a collective blog by several colleagues from SciDev.Net who are in Melbourne.

John Pilger: Being a journalist is a privilege

Towards the end of our week’s stay in Sydney for OUR Media 6 Conference, the organisers gifted us copies of The Australian Photojournalist, which is the journal of the Australian Photojournalists’ Association.

The June 2006 issue I received is a handsome volume and makes fascinating reading. On the inside front cover, I came across these words by John Pilger, the courageous and outspoken Australian journalist and film-maker hailing from Sydney.

“The best journalism is about looking behind facades and pretensions. It is never accepting the status quo; it is always questioning and remaining sceptical of the pronouncements and actions of those in authority, especially authority that is not accountable.

“The best journalism is following the dictum, wry but true: Never believe anything until it is officially denied. It is seeing the world from ground up, where ordinary people are, not from the top down, where the powerful reside. In many respects, the best journalists are the agents of ordinary people, not of those who preside over them.

“By looking at the world this way, from the standpoint of humanity not its would-be controllers, journalists will find themselves closer to the truth about all manner of things than they will ever be, following the manuals of establishment thinking.

“And by journalists, I mean photographers, too. The finest photographers produce images that ought to achieve mor than a gut reaction but help us make sense of events, great and small.

“Speaking personally, being a journalist is a privilege.”

Indeed. And few people bear that title with greater responsibility and passion than John Pilger.

I had the privilege of listening to John Pilger early on in my career, during one of the first international media conferences I attended in Sweden in the late 1980s. Of the three dozen speakers who spoke there, the only ones who have withstood the gradual erosion of memory are Pilger and Norwegian academic Johan Galtung.

Years later, I read Pilger’s book The New Rulers of the World — which was also the title of 2002 documentary film he wrote, produced and presented on the consequences of globalisation, taking Indonesia as the primary example of the serious problems with the new globalization.

And thank heavens, he shows no signs of slowing down — or mellowing.

The War on Democracy is John Pilger’s first major film for the cinema. Set in Latin America and the US, it explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Two years in the making, The War on Democracy is due to be released in cinemas in the UK on 15 June 2007.

He has produced more than 55 TV documentaries. Links to two of his more recent ones available online:

Breaking the Silence: Truth and Justice in the War on Terror (2004) on Google Video (51 mins)

Stealing a Nation (2004) on Google Video

Noam Chomsky on John Pilger

Images courtesy www.johnpilger.com

Say MDG and smile, will ya?

There we go again!

I have just done another post on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), pleading that the core issues they promote be given due prominence than simple brand promotion for MDGs and their promoters-cum-custodians (the UN).

For my readers outside the charmed development circles, MDGs are an international blueprint for human development, with eight major goals to be achieved by 2015. These goals are the means of implementing the Millennium Declaration — to which 189 governments committed at the UN Millennium Summit held in 2000.

One way to ensure the governments will keep their promise is to turn media spotlight on them. Journalists and media managers have a key role to play in this process.

With this in mind, our friends at the Asia Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD) have launched the Asia Pacific MDG Media Awards to ‘recognise and honour the best media reporting on the MDGs’. They have the backing of two UN agencies (UNDP and UNESCAP) and the Asian Development Bank. The deadline for applications is 15 April 2007.

See TVE Asia Pacific news item on Asia Pacific MDG Media Awards

All this is well and good — except that the rules of the award scheme are a bit self-limiting. There’s one that I’ve only just noticed: “Reference to the MDGs (whether one or all MDG Goals) in your content is mandatory.”

This places wrong emphasis on MDG branding when it should be on the actual issues. MDGs are not another slogan for spin doctors at UN agencies to play around with for a few years until the next development fad comes along.

MDGs are about human dignity and social justice to the half of humanity that currently lives in poverty, squalor and deprivation. It is these real world people who lose their babies to preventable childhood diseases; drop out of school because they cannot afford to stay on; die needlessly in their millions during pregnancy or childbirth; or go to bed hungry every night.

In that bigger scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter whether justice is delivered through strategies, programmes and projects labelled ABC, XYZ, MDG or something else.

Besides, MDGs are a means to an end. The process is important, but branding is not, on that journey.

Half way along the way — to the agreed target of 2015 — an informed and motivated media can help countries and development players to remain focused.

By all means, reward good journalistic coverage of development and social justice issues underscored by the MDGs. But please, let’s not turn this into another round of simple publicity and self-promotion for UN agencies.

MDG Asia Pacific website

AIBD documents on Asia Pacific MDG Media Awards

Michael Crichton, Mediasaurus and end of broadcasting

I just wrote a post on digital pioneer and futurist Mark Pesce’s views on the end of broadcasting and the mass media as we know it.

Television broadcasting is probably a dinosaur facing extinction, but let’s remember a bit of pre-history here: dinosaurs didn’t die off in an instant. No time lord zapped them with some mighty extincter machine. Their decline and eventual extinction was, it is believed, a slow and gradual process.

So it will be with broadcasting. Even if their distribution and revenue models are now undermined and will soon be obsolete, conventional broadcasting (as we know it) will continue to operate and try to compete, at least for a few years. And in the less developed countries with emerging economies, that process will take longer.

Which means we still have to engage TV broadcasters even as their Empires of Eyeball slowly crumble.

And let’s not write off those Empires just yet. I still remember an article in the early days of Wired magazine: appearing in Sep-Oct 1993 issue, it was titled Mediasaurus , and written by the well known science fiction author (and medical doctor) Michael Crichton (of Jurassic Park and ER fame).

Michael Crichton, courtesy Michael Crichton website

He started the article as:
I am the author of a novel about dinosaurs, a novel about US-Japanese trade relations, and a forthcoming novel about sexual harassment – what some people have called my dinosaur trilogy. But I want to focus on another dinosaur, one that may be on the road to extinction. I am referring to the American media. And I use the term extinction literally. To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace.

And he ended:
So I hope that this era of polarized, junk-food journalism will soon come to an end. For too long the media have accepted the immortal advice of Yogi Berra, who said: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” But business as usual no longer serves the audience. And although technology will soon precipitate enormous changes in the media, we face a more immediate problem: a period of major social change. We are going to need a sensitive, informed, and responsive media to accomplish those changes. And that’s the way it is.

I just re-read the full article, and Crichton’s analysis is even more valid today than when it was written over a dozen years ago. But it’s also true that the broadcast industry – and conventional media as a whole – have changed and adapted.

No doubt that Mediasaurus still has an expiry date, but it’s not easy trying to guess exactly when the last of their kind drops dead.

Read the full article on Wired Online

Mark Pesce: In the company of a hypermind

Oops – I didn’t immediately realise that I was sharing a panel with a digerati – a highly accomplished pioneer and visionary of the digital world. And did he get us to think outside the idiot box!

His name is Mark Pesce. He is one of the early pioneers in Virtual Reality.
The co-inventor of VRML, he is the author of five books and numerous papers on the future of technology. Now based on Sydney, Australia, he is a writer, researcher and teacher.

Mark Pesce, courtesy Wikipedia

During the OUR Media 6 panel discussing how to safeguard community interests in the era of digital broadcasting, he was emphatic that broadcasting as we know it is doomed.

“The mass mind is not going to last. The sooner broadcasters recognise this, the better,” he said.

The broadcast model of one-way, point-to-multipoint, passive distribution of content is endangered by the digital revolution. The age of hyperdistribution has already dawned, and that is going to wipe out conventional distribution models sooner than later.

Hyperdistribution is audience-driven distribution of films and television programmes. The economics of production and distribution of media have changed radically – can film-makers adapt to the new rules? This is the question that Mark posed in talk given at the Sydney International Film Festival in Jube 2006 – listen to audio recording of his talk.

The near future of content distribution is in Internet-enabled, user-driven and often mobile devices. Already, two billion people – almost a third of humanity – walks around with mobile phones. These will provide new pathways to peddle new types of content to more audiences than ever before.

The film-making and TV-producing communities need to wake up to these new realities, Mark said.

His blog, Hyperpeople, is full of fascinating insights and extrapolations. Here’s one short extract:
Television producers are about to learn the same lessons that film studios and the recording industry learned before them: what the audience wants, it gets. Take your clips off of YouTube, and watch as someone else – quite illegally – creates another hyperdistribution system for them. Attack that system, and watch as it fades into invisibility. Those attacks will force it to evolve into ever-more-undetectable forms. That’s the lesson of music-sharing site Napster, and the lesson of torrent-sharing site Supernova. When you attack the hyperdistribution system, you always make the problem worse.

In May 2005, he wrote in an article titled Piracy is good? How Battlestar Galactica killed broadcast TV:
Television broadcasters owe their existence to the absence of substantially effective competition. When you’re dealing with real-world materials that are in naturally short supply – whether diamonds, oil, or broadcasting spectrum — a cartel can maintain and enforce its oligopoly. But when you’re working with media, which exist today as digital ephemera, bits that can be copied and reproduced endlessly at nearly zero cost, broadcast oligopolies are susceptible to a form of “digital arbitrage,” which can hollow-out their empires in an afternoon. Hyperdistribution techniques are more efficient than broadcast networks for television program distribution.

Read my other post on the OUR Media Forum on the community use of digital spectrum

Mark Pesce website

Mark Pesce blog, Hyperpeople

Blogging turns 10 – Happy Birthday to Us!

“Check this out. Amazing!”

Four simple words. Yet they sparked what snowballed into a revolution of sorts on the web.

Those were the very first words to be written on the first blog.

Blogging turned 10 on 1 April 2007.

Created by the US web guru Dave Winer, Scripting News is regarded as the first modern blog, though the term “weblog” was not used in the early days.

Having first gone online on 1 April 1997, Scripting News is still going strong and is credited with helping popularise RSS and podcasting, too.

Winer himself actually calls info.cern.ch, built by Tim Berners-Lee, the first weblog because it “pointed to all the new sites as they came online”.

According to his blog (what else?), Winer, 51, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. He is a former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, my own favourite guide to the often bewildering but fascinating digital world.

Latest figures indicate an estimated 70 million blogs in existence, with around 1.5m posts being written every day.

According to Technorati, which monitors and aggregates blogs, some 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day – that’s about 1.4 blogs every second.

Oh, and what did Dave Winer want checked out? It was just a list of websites he had visited that day.

Read The Guardian (UK) article on 10 years of blogging.

MDG: A message from our spin doctors?

References to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are popping out of every UN document, speech and communication product these days. Each agency and official seem to be keen to outdo all others in living and swearing by this new ‘development mantra’ of our times.

MDGs are an international blueprint for human development, with eight major goals to be achieved by 2015. These goals are the means of implementing the Millennium Declaration — to which 189 governments committed at the UN Millennium Summit held in 2000.

But important as they are, the MDGs are only a means to an end, even if an extremely worthwhile one. If we lose sight of that, we risk allowing the MDG ‘dog’ to wag the development ‘dog’.

Alfonso Gumucio Dagron

Speaking at OUR Media 6 conference in Sydney this week, Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron, Managing Director – Programmes of the Communication for Social Change Consortium, cautioned about development agencies engaging in too much spin or public relations, and too little real communication.

Alfonso, a widely experienced and highly respected practitioner and thinker in development communication, lamented how institutional publicity is taking a much higher priority than communication as a social process that gives a voice to the communities and players involved.

Ah, finally a dev-com heavyweight echoes what I’ve been saying for some time! At every UN and media platform I could access in the past couple of years, I’ve stressed that catalysing wide ranging public discussion and debate on the MDGs’ core issues is far more important than simply enhancing ‘brand recognition’ for MDGs themselves. (That’s useful too, but as part of a wider process.)

On the eve of the MDG+5 Summit at UN Headquarters in September 2005, I wrote in an editorial published by SciDev.Net:

Today’s MDG promoters need to revisit some of the more successful development efforts of the past few decades — such as promoting universal human rights, eradicating smallpox, popularising oral rehydration salts, and wiping out Southern debt — and study the role good communication played in each.

Those in the UN system, in particular, have to find more creative ways of getting the MDG message across. In my view, MDG ‘branding’ is not what is important; it is the core set of issues that MDGs embody that need mass attention and aggressive promotion.

We should also invoke the memory of past visionary leaders who navigated the treacherous inter-governmental minefields to talk truth to power. One was James Grant, former executive director of the UN children’s agency, turned UNICEF into a formidable global brand.

One of Grant’s enduring remarks concerned the silent emergency of several thousand children (and adults) dying everyday from preventable diarrhoeal diseases. It was, he pointed out repeatedly, as if several jumbo jets full of children were crashing everyday — and nobody took any notice.

That metaphor might lack political correctness in the post-11 September era. But the message was loud and clear. Grants’ one time deputy at UNICEF, Tarzie Vittachi, was another master at summing up complex development issues in memorable ways. When he was head of information at the UN population agency, the former newspaper editor used to remind everyone: ‘Governments don’t have babies; people do.’

Read my full editorial in SciDev.Net in September 2005: Simpler words are needed to get MDG message across

Let’s resolve analog anomalies before going fully digital…

At the last minute, I was invited to join a forum on Community use of digital spectrum at OUR Media 6 Conference here in Sydney.

I agreed because I have written and spoken for years about how we in developing Asia are blissfully ignorant about the gross misuse and abuse of our electro-magnetic spectrum by its custodians – our governments.

I was the odd one out on this panel, as all others were from Australia -– I don’t even live in a country that has set a timeframe for transition from analog to digital spectrum in broadcasting.

Only a few countries in Asia have as yet announced a timeframe for this -– Japan, Korea and Malaysia among them. Some have not even thought of this issue – they are dealing with more basic concerns in broadcast regulation and policy formulation. Yet I found this discussion instructive: sooner or later, all countries will have to go through this transition. It certainly helps to know the issues you are debating and grappling with.

Cartoon Stock

An extract from my remarks:

We should address fundamental reforms in broadcast policy, law and regulation before embarking on the high-cost, tedious and slow process of moving the entire production and distribution process to digital. We who haven’t derived and shared the full benefits of analog broadcasting must get our fundamentals right before going digital.

And therein lies the challenge for all of us who want to safeguard media freedom and promote the freedom of expression and cultural production. In my view, many activists in our region are not paying enough attention to how the electro-magnetic spectrum has been mismanaged and abused by various governments. Activist attention has been held by the more tangible, physical threats to media freedom: issues such as censorship, media ownership and political economy of the media.

All these are worthwhile and necessary — but not sufficient on their own.

During discussion, I also made the points:

The spectrum has been called the ‘invisible wealth of nations’. As economic and cultural practices move more and more into the digital realm, we’re going to increasingly feel the value of this common property resource. All our gains in the physical world would be undermined if we find the spectrum has been irretrievably allocated to a handful of privileged users ignoring the public interest. We need to wake up to this reality.

Perhaps it’s just as well we in developing Asia don’t have tight timeframes to switch from analog to digital spectrum use. We’ve got a good deal of cleaning up and streamlining to do in the analog realm.

This window will be open only for a few years. If we don’t act, we run the risk of making an equal mess in the digital spectrum, only far worse.

In terms of action, I suggest three simple yet important steps:

For us in the developing countries – or emerging economies – in Asia, I suggest three actions:
• Look forward to the transition from analog to digital spectrum
• Look sideways to see how we’re currently doing in the analog domain
• Look back to reflect on the mistakes we’ve made along the way (and learn)

Read the cleaned up text of my panel remarks plus responses
om6-forum-on-digital-spectrum-nalaka-remarks.pdf

Wikipedia on Open Spectrum

Copyright, copyleft and film-makers in the digital age

In my post on 1 April, Have you made your million dollars yet?, I wrote:

Many development film-makers like to decry our society’s obsession with money, consumerism and greed. Some would make films that passionately promote sharing ideas and resources at community level, and advocate common property resources over private ownership.

But when it comes to rights of their own film/s, these very film-makers would become extremely possessive: they want to restrict it in every conceivable way.

This came up during a session at the OUR Media 6 conference in Sydney yesterday.

Andrew Lowenthal, from EngageMedia in Australia, talked on ‘Online video for social action’ and presented what his non-profit organisation is doing.

As their website says:
EngageMedia is a website and a network for distributing social justice and environmental video from South East Asia, Australia and the Pacific. It is a space for critical documentary, fiction, artistic and experimental works that challenge the one-way communication model of the mainstream media.

Andrew said they currently host around 120 videos online, all offered for free public access at the moment. They are keen to add more titles to this collection, to build an online, engaged community of film makers and film viewers.

But as we discussed, many film makers aren’t yet ready or willing to give their films to be placed online.

“Some of them freak out at the very mention of being placed online. They ask how their copyright can be safeguarded, and how they can make money,” Andrew noted.

Fred Noronha, who has campaigned for a long time for Indian documentary makers to open up and share their films, agreed. “Many film-makers are apprehensive. They aren’t broadcasting, or webcasting their productions. They just show it at a few film festivals. Many films don’t go out to the wider public.”

At TVE Asia Pacific, we come across this all the time. As a non-commercial, non-exclusive distributor, we ask film-makers to share distribution rights while copyright stays firmly with them. Even then, many are not convinced.

Of course, each creative professional is entitled to the full returns of their investment of time, effort and creativity. But let’s not forget: many films, especially those on development issues (which covers health, education, environment, ICT, science in development and human rights, among others), are made with development funding or philanthropic grants. Which means the production costs are largely or entirely paid for.

Yet when such films are made, their creators would rather hang on to them than let them go. Copyright is one concern they cite. ‘Returns on investment’ is another. (Hmmm…if a film has been paid for by public/donor funds, returns to whom?)

Creative Commons offers a good way forward, and we had a presentation from CC Australia on this during the session. More about that later.

Go to:
Engage Media
Creative Commons