I’m no expert really (note lack of videos by me on this site!), but I am quite a good researcher and this post should serve as a decent sign-posting intro to good video blogging tips and tools
Places to upload your videos: http://www.vimeo.com/ http://blip.tv/
(those are the two most film maker people I know use)
(one of them lets you automatically add them to http://www.archive.org
which is a good idea)
(and, of course, you should upload to youtube too – where the biggest
audience is)
PS thanks to Viv Gooding (who ran the build of Ben Law’s house, incidentally) for asking me about this stuff whilst I was at Embercombe (the text above is basically an e-mail I sent him), and to tav too (his recent post on becoming a film maker prompted me to whack this info up here )
This documentary from the BBC is one of the most impressive things I’ve seen on TV for a long time. Highly recommended.
Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key.
With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family’s wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year’s high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is.
Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future. (from BBC)
In America’s earliest days, there were barn-raising parties in which neighbors helped each other build up their farms. Today, in some churches, there are debt liquidation revivals in which parishioners chip in to free each other from growing credit card debts that are driving American families to bankruptcy and desperation. IN DEBT WE TRUST is the latest film from Danny Schechter, “The News Dissector,” director of the internationally distributed and award-winning WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception), an expose of the media’s role in the Iraq War. The Emmy-winning former ABC News and CNN producer’s new hard-hitting documentary investigates why so many Americans are being strangled by debt. It is a journalistic confrontation with what former Reagan advisor Kevin Phillips calls “Financialization”–the “powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial complex.” While many Americans may be “maxing out” on credit cards, there is a deeper story: power is shifting into fewer hands…..with frightening consequences. IN DEBT WE TRUST shows how the mall replaced the factory as America’s dominant economic engine and how big banks and credit card companies buy our Congress and drive us into what a former major bank economist calls modern serfdom. Americans and our government owe trillions in consumer debt and the national debt, a large amount of it to big banks and billions to Communist China.
An examination of the commercialization of Christmas in America while following Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse (the end of humankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt.) The film also delves into issues such as the role sweatshops play in America’s mass consumerism and Big-Box Culture. From the humble beginnings of preaching at his portable pulpit on New York City subways, to having a congregation of thousands – Bill Talen (aka Rev. Billy) has become the leader of not just a church, but a national movement.
After the first Zeitgeist Movie was released it was saddening how many people took at as the whole and complete truth without asking any further questions (particularly when the homepage of the films producer used to read “It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth”).
The first part of the original movie made too much of the obvious fact that most monotheistic religions share lots of similar threads, building on what came before.
Sure, many religious institutions have become dogmatic conservative bodies and some extremists perpetuate divides. But the fact is that, being part of a church group or similar is one of the most statistically likely thing to increase reported quality of life (best explained by the human desire and need to belong and experience community, I guess)
The second bit of the film was all about 911 being an inside job. There is certainly more evidence for that than there is for the official story, but there are many better documented examples of false flag terrorism and of US (and UK) governments violently overthrowing democracies to instill dictators. So I don’t like how much emphasis people place on 911.
This sort of stuff has been normal practice for a long time so I don’t like how much emphasis people place on 911.
Anyway, I thought the beginning of third part of Zeitgeist – The Movie about the Federal Reserve was well done, and the bulk of this second film follows on from this:
This very long (215 minutes) money documentary has lots of interesting history in it about the battle over the control of money and banking in the US. If I remember rightly the presenter proposes going back to the gold standard, but whilst that might be better than what we’ve got now, it doesn’t really make much sense either (as nicely explained in Money as Debt)
“The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world’s money…” THE MONEY MASTERS is a 3 1/2 hour non-fiction, historical documentary that traces the origins of the political power structure that rules our nation and the world today. The modern political power structure has its roots in the hidden manipulation and accumulation of gold and other forms of money. The development of fractional reserve banking practices in the 17th century brought to a cunning sophistication the secret techniques initially used by goldsmiths fraudulently to accumulate wealth. With the formation of the privately-owned Bank of England in 1694, the yoke of economic slavery to a privately-owned “central” bank was first forced upon the backs of an entire nation, not removed but only made heavier with the passing of the three centuries to our day. Nation after nation, including America, has fallen prey to this cabal of international central bankers.”
This is the amazing story of how a small island nation resisted against the might of corporate globalization and won. Bougainville, with a populations of only 160,000 has managed to close and keep closed one of the biggest mines in the world. They have held their ground for a decade with antique weapons and homemade guns. These people have taken on the biggest mining company in the world and won. Ripped from the DVD “Indigenous Resistance in New Guinea” made by Solidarity South Pacific: www.eco-action.org/ssp – respect!
