I remember walking out of one of my classes at Memphis College of Art and seeing a poster titled "KONY 2012" telling me to come to the lecture on Tuesday March 6th. I've seen it around campus a couple times and every time I kept thinking "Kony. Kony... Where have I heard that before." This time around I decided to take a closer look at the poster and in smaller print I read "INVISIBLE CHILDREN" and thought "DUHHH!!"
I remember watching the first one-hour documentary of Invisible Children in 2007. I believe the video had been out five years prior to that. It was a friend of mine that referred me to IC, and eventually I browsed through their site and ran across the video, and I had become a supporter of Invisible Children.
Little did I know that they had been working on a new campaign, which was what this lecture was for. I was so impressed and captivated by their thirty-minute video. Even more, I was touched seeing how grown up Jacob was. I remember seeing him for the first time in their first documentary video. What was not mentioned in the thirty-minute video about Jacob, the part where he broke into tears about his brother, is that it was the first time Jacob cried since he could remember, because children in the LRA were not allowed to cry (many who did were severely beaten and even killed).
I am extremely interested in learning about digital film and editing specifically to create videos like these, where people can be informed on what is happening around the world. This is one organization working on one specific case at the moment, but there are other Joseph Konys out there involved in enslaving children to do other horrible things. There are people who are extremely oppressed in many different ways, and I'm still searching, as an individual, where my focus will be, and what I truly want to expose. But even more, I'm extremely impressed with the use of social networking that truly helped push the campaign. I believe that the video received more the 40,000,000 hits in a 48-hour period.
If you haven't seen it, here it is (Note that the war has been over for a few years now. This is no longer happening in Uganda):
I had heard of the Invisible Children before the lecture too. I first learned about Uganda's plight on the Oprah show; I think that episode aired in 2006 or '07. I can relate to your sentiments of using cinema as a tool to expose evil, and thereby, cause good. I often feel that way when I learn new skills here at MCA. Obviously, if any sort of video is famous enough, it has the potential to bring about a massive response from millions of people, like the Kony 2012 video. YouTube can be a powerful tool for good; but I didn't always feel that way about it. I could write a paper about my views on modern technology, but I'm not going to anytime soon. Sometimes, rather than giving money, which I have little of, or time, which is either impractical or not one of the options, I hope that it would help if I simply spread the word in a way that makes ripples. Maybe more good could come of it, in some cases.
ReplyDelete