When’s the last time you found yourself suspended over a sunlit mountain at 9,000 feet?

Of the many wonders on our recent trip to Telluride Colorado, it was these regular twilight gondola rides that got me thinking about the work we do at Good Eye Video. This bird’s eye view of natural beauty, with a glittering resort town in the distance, is emblematic of the point of view we begin many of our projects with. Broad, fuzzy strokes of a social issue viewed from an enclosed space (viewfinder or monitor). It’s a fascinating vantage point, but it can get a little lonely too.

It’s not often we get to spend time with fellow storytellers… people who devote their waking hours to creating images that engage and move people. This seems both a practical problem (no one to talk shop with) and a motivational one. How do we remain grounded and engaged and inspired by all that we see?

Which brings me to the reason for our trip to Colorado. Mountainfilm is a film festival dedicated to “inspiring and motivating audiences about issues that matter”. Each year it brings some of the world’s most creative and committed outdoor adventurers, environmentalists and social activists to the high mountain paradise of Telluride. We traveled with our friends at ioby.org to document a very cool project, funding a community Aquaponics project. (Much more on this particular video soon!)

In typical fashion our trip unfolded organically… leading us from lecture halls to mountaintop organic farms to an ice cream social on Main St. Amongst the craziness of the shoot itself, we did make it to a few of the amazing films and panels. It was incredibly inspiring to hear everyone from veteran journalists, to first time directors discuss their work and the current climate of change making. My favorites were listening to John Hockenberry (maybe one of the smartest people alive) and watching God Loves Uganda (a doc everyone should see this year).

But it was James Balog, (the force behind the amazing doc Chasing Ice), that struck me the most. As a veteran National Geographic photographer, James struggled for years to tell world about the catastrophic effects climate change is having on the environment he photographs. But, after his doc came out, he realized that films have a power that his photos never could. He explained how he’s reoriented his entire focus as a journalist to speak the language of our time; video. This sounds like a pretty simple revelation, but it was a powerful reminder to me that even our most talented storytellers are looking to the moving image. James and his fellow panelists encouraged us all to push forward and look for new ways to use film/video to tell the story of climate change.

We came to Telluride to work… to remain studiously inside our gondola. Instead Mountainfilm left both Erin and I with an unexpected appetite to get out and walk around a little. It left us hungry to push the boundaries of what video can do to create a better world. We thank ioby and all our clients for providing us with these opportunities to see something from a new place and re-imagine our own way of looking at the world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s not very often that we get to work with celebrities.  Real life, New York City celebrities.  The kind of people who you meet and  think… “wow, it’s so cool that I just got to work with you!”  But on this shoot, for the Community Service Society of New York,… we did.

CSS is one of those organizations whose been fighting poverty since New York’s horse and buggy days. Over their 170 year history, they’ve participated in some of the biggest struggles low-income New Yorkers have faced. It was amazing to tell the story of their unwavering commitment through the images of our everyday, working neighbors.

So, it’s not surprising that we met some celebrities along the way.  Like Salvador, who stood motionless in the cold with us for an hour in Times Square, and Victor, who happily spent his lunch break riding around on the subways with us.  Not to mention Carolyn, who smiled and smiled for the camera, and of course the entire first grade of super stars at PS 7 in East Harlem. All normal people, whose commitment to hard work, learning and social change made this a truly wonderful project.

And we can’t forget the narrator, Danny Glover. He did a pretty good job too.

Many thanks to all of our celebrity co-stars for their help in making this video possible!

Have you been to Chelsea?  That neighborhood on the west side of New York City?  Home to world famous art galleries and the newly-renovated Highline?

I bet you have…  But what you might not know is that Chelsea’s also home to Hudson Guild, an amazing organization that has been supporting low-income residents of the neighborhood public housing buildings for over 100 years.

We had the honor of getting to know this other Chelsea, while telling the story of Hudson Guild and one of its most involved (and photogenic!) families: The Smiths.  Anjie, Asia, Isaiah, and Mary were gracious enough to let us explore their Hudson Guild as they worked and learned (and ate their morning cereal).  We were also lucky to work with Muna, a graduate and big fan of Hudson Guild, who proved an amazing guide through the community.

Of the many wonderful places where we get to spend time, Hudson Guild was special…. overflowing with this powerful sense of community. From toddler yoga to high school cooking classes to senior latin dance… we saw neighbors from age 2 to age 92 in a space that seemed like a home to each.

In a city where we are increasingly separated by occupation, income, age (and the list goes on), it’s a rare blessing to be somewhere that feels expressly designed to bring people together.Thanks to the many residents of Chelsea who lent us their time, smiles and yes…. amazing dance mores (we mean you 1st graders!) We hope you’ll watch this video and next time you’re in Chelsea… look up at those big brick buildings and see what we see…. a whole community facing each day, together.

That’s our cosmic situation as summed up by Neil deGrasse Tyson in this awesome/old episode of NPR’s RadioLab, which manages to inspire both deep feelings of joy at the seemingly boundlessness of our universe and a profound, if quiet sense of loneliness.

It’s this last sentiment that, for me, points to a central question we almost always ignore as social change storytellers; Why do we care? What are we building a better world for, if our collective human experience is merely a blink of an eye in the long drama of stars and black holes?

There are of course many scientific, philosophical and poetic rebuttals to this line of thinking, but at the heart of every struggle over hearts and minds, these questions still exist. Science has brought us dreams of distant galaxies, but also the pervading feeling that we are small… that what we do on the societal level is fleeting. Every potential donor or advocate encounters us with this deeply engrained psychology.

But for me, the inspiring part is this: (deGrasse Tyson again)

“I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.”

Even at the threshold of science’s biggest and perhaps most important frontier, we return to story. This unifying narrative, that we are “literally made of star dust” taps into some of our most ancient archetypal stories (the hero, the quest, the voyage) It is not only a comforting rationale for our smallness, but a call to arms.

In some ways, we need to invite stakeholders to join us for the biggest story ever, a tale of meaning-making in an ever-expanding universe. We need to present our social change efforts as a haven for all those who feel like the world is too big for them to have an impact. It’s a fantastically abstract idea when you’re thinking about how to meet your fundraising goals, but it’s also a tremendously powerful one.

It’s no coincidence that last year’s now infamous Kony 2012 began with a shot of the earth rotating in space… Storytellers have always begun their tales with images of vast plains, great oceans, the star-filled night sky…. And they’ve always linked this grandeur to the small struggles of individuals with names and faces and human problems. The personal story is the antidote for the feeling we feel when we think of ourselves as “a speck on a speck on a speck.”

The human brain in its pattern craving folds, longs to fit our individual story into a broader narrative that begins with the big bang and sprawls onward towards some unknown shining metropolis of progress. We need to tell this story over and over again…. because it’s the one people want to be a part of.

That and nobody can resist a good ending…

At FUNDESYRAM, we met Gerarda, a small farmer and mother of two who was in the process of growing her farm to include some incredible initiatives, like raising pigs and chickens, installing a biogas stove, growing seedlings to sell at the market, and even composting.  She graciously agreed to a short interview and explained how excited she was not only to be increasing her production, but to watch her daughter begin college in the fall.  Meeting Gerarda inspired us and highlighted the reason that the work IAF is doing is so critical.  It seeks out the best ideas from people like Gerarda and her community to solve their own problems, instead of waiting for a solution.  After all, as you’ll hear in the video, who will work harder for an idea than the idea’s own originator??

El Salvador is an absolutely beautiful country, filled with sprawling farmlands and picturesque mountains.  We even read they have some of the most sought after surfing spots in the entire world!  While the rest of the northeast was deep into winter, we were spoiled to be in a country where the average temperature was 75 degrees everyday, with beautiful blue skies and incredible sunsets.  But, even with all of this beauty to speak of, it’s definitely the people we met that we’ll think of most!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Happy 2013!  A perfect start to our new year is the news we got this morning that our video, “Legacy of Welcome” for Episcopal Migration Ministries (which you might remember from a post in November) was featured on today’s Daily Dogooder!  We’re excited to have this video out in the Dogooder universe, spreading the word about the awesome work EMM is doing with refugees from all over the world to this country.  It makes us feel pretty proud to live in a nation that wholeheartedly welcomes these newcomers and makes room for them in our communities.

Please have a look here, on Dogooder’s Facebook & Twitter pages, and share far and wide!

What a busy year it’s been! We’ve had a moment to catch our breath and will be working to catch you up on all the awesome projects this year has brought with it.

Once again, one of our most rewarding experiences has been the chance to travel around the country telling the story of Episcopal Migration Ministries & the thousands of refugees they support. We drove around Boise, ID with Benjamin, a Congolese refugee turned driving instructor… we watched Nung Sin, a little girl from Burma thrive in her New Bern, NC elementary school. From Atlanta to Austin we saw communities come together to do something that sounds so simple… welcome the newcomer.

Among the many lessons of hard work, humility and resilience that these new American’s have taught us, I think we came away from these shoots with a new perspective on our country. I know it sounds cliche, but immigrants (many of whom come as refugees) make this country the prosperous place it is. That’s clear when you hear about refugees riding their bikes 10 miles to a minimum wage job or creating a prosperous photography businesses from the ashes of a former life.

This year’s work culminated in the above video, which attempts to tell the story America as built by Refugees. I think it’s a legacy we can all be proud of. Thank you again to EMM and all of our amazing refugee friends… you make our job the most fulfilling in the world.

Here are four of the video series we produced in Boise, New Bern, Austin & Atlanta:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Learning another language has never been my strong suit. Every time we are working abroad I have this sense of shame when I can’t greet someone in their own tongue, instead reverting to silence or worse “Hello”.

But language is more than just a way to order food or ask for directions, it’s the first real step towards the deeper understanding so often absent in the world. This struck me more than ever a few months ago when we were shooting a video for NSLI (a State Department sponsored language exchange program) in Northern Turkey.

We saw how learning a language like Turkish can unlock family connections, life long friendships and a rarely understood culture. The above video is about the language learning adventure of American exchange students in a truly beautiful country.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Can you imagine traveling half-way around the world to a completely different climate, to live with a new family, speak a new language, and start a new school for a year… all at 16?

Earlier this year, we headed to the small town of Whitefish, Montana to tell the story of Nadeem who did just that.  Originally from Pakistan, Nadeem applied and was accepted to the extremely competitive YES program, which brought him to Whitefish for his senior year of high school.  He was gracious enough to let us follow him for a week to school, study sessions, barbecues and on a family trip.  He gave incredible talks to his history class, explaining what life was like in Pakistan, what kind of food he eats at home, what his friends do for fun.  Having spent a few days at Whitefish High, I can attest to how engaged and interested his classmates were when he spoke and how inspired they were by the leap of faith he took to come here.

It was astounding to see how, in a town without much exposure to people who look like Nadeem, he was known (and loved!) by everyone he met.  We’ve seen  firsthand that it takes a LOT of effort, organization and of course money to facilitate exchange programs like this… but we have also learned how essential these exchanges are to understanding the world.  Isn’t it awesome that everyone in Whitefish can now point to Pakistan on a map and say “my friend Nadeem lives there!”  We think so.