This is the final part of 3 posts showing all the ads TED deemed worth spreading. Please click on the links for Part 1 and Part 2.
The TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) community just released its 2011 Ads Worth Spreading contest winners, and the ads are better than the ones I have seen for the Super Bowl in any year! But what did you expect from a brilliant group who’s moniker is “Ideas Worth Spreading”?
These ads aren’t like those in the Super Bowl where they last 30-60 seconds. They tend to be much longer, often the full version of the ad rather than the truncated TV time version. However, with ads like these, I could watch commercials in place of TV shows because I don’t notice how long or short the ads were. I’m actually a little sad once it’s over, alongside whatever mood the commercials left me in.
I have posted the ads here because I have found higher quality versions of the ads than the ones available on the TED website. Otherwise, I’d have just linked to them all on TED’s site.
Vượt Biên: Voyage of a Diaspora is my silent one minute film that metaphorically depicts the Vietnamese Boat People’s journey for freedom, using photos from the United Nations’ Photo Library, among other sources.
This past spring, I was fortunate enough to have been accepted into the One Minute Film (OMF) program with the Atlantic Filmmakers’ Cooperative (AFCOOP) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This is a video rendition of my OMF project, not a digitization for reasons described in the Production Notes of the film press kit, so the poor quality. However, this will suffice to share with others who would otherwise literally need a film projector to be able to see it.
The film press kit also has much more detail on the topics covered, images, production notes and additional resources about the Vietnamese Boat People.
The One Minute Film experience was an incredible one for me, and I think I could say the same on behalf of my colleagues in the program. We were trained on everything from story development, which is challenging in a one minute film for all kinds of genres, to lighting, camera operations and techniques like animation, film properties and handling, editing, casting, among many other topics. We had a great diversity of styles and genres, and all the hard work paid off as all the films turned out fabulously! I am the first to post mine online, but as more of my colleagues do, I will add links.
You can search one minute film on YouTube to see a whole host of others as this is a genre and program which exists in many countries and has been done for many years.
The OMF project was my first experience with film, but the mentors, instructors and AFCOOP staff did a fabulous job with me and my colleagues to help us produce what we did. In the age of digital YouTube where people just snap and film everything digitally, impromptu, people pick up a lot of bad artistic habits from never having to think about preparing for shots and just take an infinite number of redos until they get something sort of OK. What I learned through the OMF program will be of value to me in many capacities, not just filming, for a long time to come. The skills are valuable for lots of forms of communication, from writing to film to photography, but the preparation habits will be priceless. The discipline from having to work hard for one take so you would prepare as much as possible to prevent things from going wrong is hard to teach, and harder to undo for the young casual digital shooters who never knew what it’s like to have 24 film shots in a camera with a price to develop each shot.
I would highly recommend the film experience if you have never tried it. Check with local film organizations in your local area to see if they have intro film programs, especially something like the One Minute Film program. In Nova Scotia, the entry forms to the program can be found on the AFCOOP site in January, with the deadlines for February 1 or there abouts. Don’t pass it up if you have ever had any inkling to try out making film, even if ultimately digital. The program is free! Your ideas and work are the only things required, with incredible gratification for what you put in.
Aside from big thanks to my OMF colleagues, AFCOOP staff, mentors and instructors, I would also like to thank my Parents and a certain lady at the United Nations photo library in New York, which is not a public archive. When I showed up at their doorstep and told her my story, she signed me in past security and gave me access to their entire digitized collection of Vietnamese refugee photos. That definitely made it easier for me to make this film with all the photos and not having to decide right on the spot which ones I would request. Serendipity has been with me again and again, in ways I could not believe, in the making of this film, and I am grateful to whomever I should be.
What do you think of when you think of the shark? A fearsome monster? A man eater from the ocean? Something that should be killed if seen from land?
If you’re like most people of the world, that’s generally what you would think of when you think of a shark. However, sharks are nothing like that. It’s all man-made myth!
Sharks are rather shy, intelligent and have incredible senses. They avoid people if they can, actually being afraid of people, and often know better than to eat people despite how people resemble the seals they actually eat. They eat the only way they know how, and most are not like the way they are portrayed in movies like Jaws. Furthermore, they have a huge environmental impact by being at the top of the food chain, controlling populations of other species below them so all the phytoplankton in the oceans which generate oxygen for us to breathe are allowed to do just that. We are destroying our future just by letting a bunch of fishermen slaughter all these sharks because some people in China believes eating their fins bestow good health and miracle cures, and are willing to pay a ton of money for them.
Sharks are absolutely remarkable creatures which have survived hundreds of millions of years, virtually unchanged, while the world around it has or has become extinct. They were here 150 million years before the dinosaurs! Come see how amazing they truly are, and how they are being hunted to extinction by greedy people who only take their fins and throw the rest of the animal away. Sharkwater will show you all of this, with remarkable cinematography in a captivating adventure that has won 31 major international film awards.
More of the world needs to see this film. I hope you will watch it if you have not, and/or tell other people about it!
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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Vodpod videos no longer available.
This full-length online version is of good quality, though not the same as a DVD version, obviously. But if you can’t get access to the DVD, this will do. This also has English and Chinese (not sure which form) subtitles. If it gets stuck loading when you play it, please pause it for a few minutes while it loads and come back. You should be fine, then.
Synopsis
For filmmaker Rob Stewart, exploring sharks began as an underwater adventure. What it turned into was a beautiful and dangerous life journey into the balance of life on earth. Driven by passion fed from a lifelong fascination with sharks, Stewart debunks historical stereotypes and media depictions of sharks as bloodthirsty, man-eating monsters and reveals the reality of sharks as pillars in the evolution of the seas. Filmed in visually stunning, high definition video, Sharkwater takes you into the most shark rich waters of the world, exposing the exploitation and corruption surrounding the world’s shark populations in the marine reserves of Cocos Island, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador.
In an effort to protect sharks, Stewart teams up with renegade conservationist Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Their unbelievable adventure together starts with a battle between the Sea Shepherd and shark poachers in Guatemala, resulting in pirate boat rammings, gunboat chases, mafia espionage, corrupt court systems and attempted murder charges, forcing them to flee for their lives. Through it all, Stewart discovers these magnificent creatures have gone from predator to prey, and how despite surviving the earth’s history of mass extinctions, they could easily be wiped out within a few years due to human greed. Stewart’s remarkable journey of courage and determination changes from a mission to save the world’s sharks, into a fight for his life, and that of humankind.
After creating my version of the next generation of pictorial Facebook tagging meme in theMost Likely to version,the logical progression was a Least Likely To version below so this is original at the time of posting as far as I know it. While one can use this poster in a pessimistic way towards tagging people for the future, to identify friends who would be least likely to do something, I meant it as a reflective exercise with the instructions being to tag friends who were least like to do something.
This is an exercise to acknowledge how people change in big ways we don’t expect, but that we should afford them the chance to in life, rather than blocking them in by removing their potential. I’m generally a positive kind of guy, though with a bit of a wicked sense of humour, at times, as you can see by some of my choices in the poster below. As a result, despite using the same poster as the Most Likely to version, I changed the picture text to be more general in some circumstances. We may dream or lift others to the post of president, for example, but in reality, just being a leader applies to far more of us than president, no matter what kind of president you want to consider.
Here’s how to get the new graphic for your Facebook fun:
Click on the picture below to get it at full size.
Right click on that picture and save to your computer.
Upload it to your Facebook profile.
Tag your friends!
Click the Back button on your browser to return to this post.
Please click here for a complete list of over 100 Facebook picture tagging memes on this site with which you can use for fun with your friends.
In case you don’t recognize some of these people, they are as follows, left to right:
Top: Peyton Manning, Wangari Matthai, Osama bin Laden, Paris Hilton, Jet Li
Middle: Pamela Anderson, Bob Dylan, Oprah Winfrey, the current Dalai Lama, Sue Johannson
Bottom: Claudia Schiffer, Martha Stewart, Bill Gates, Anna Nicole Smith, Barack Obama
I’m too tired to put links to all these people but you can Google them, and maybe guess why I’ve put labeled each as such.
Digital Citizen 