Production Schedule - Remainder of Semester

Marching Orders

AFSC has been busy lately in preparation for their part in the upcoming protest this Saturday. Here's a copy of the route they plan to take in Midtown on the 19th to raise awareness in the community for their cause:


Here's a video from tonight's SCAP meeting featuring Tim Franzen discussing this weekend's plans (this is just secondary video shot on an iPhone, we were also shooting the meeting with a high quality camera for possible use in our final piece):

Atlantans UNITE!

Saturday, March 19 @ Noon

10th Street Plaza to Piedmont Park

Join SCAP and roughly eleven other pro-peace organizations in a march against the ongoing and costly wars. Bring posters, signs, and a prominent voice!

Kris and Victoria will be in attendance and are eager to capture the message of those attending.

See you then! 

Representational Possibilities

So the one thing that I think has stuck with me the most, and it seems has stuck with the others in the group, is this very clearly defined concept of the limited number of "boxes" high school students often find themselves forced into. These are:

-College
-McJob (i.e. low paying non-skilled labor)
-Military
-Crime, drug sales, etc.

The goal of SCAP seems to be expand and multiply these limited sources of opportunity. Victoria has already been working on some illustrations that we might be able to use to represent this idea. Last night it occurred to me that another way to represent these "boxes" would be be through the idea of doors students have the option of going through after high school. While I don't know exactly how this would be accomplished yet within our piece (and it has the danger of coming off as cliche i.e. "open the door to opportunity"), I think a lot of interesting possibilities come up. We could do a very simple animation using a variety of techniques. We could actually shoot doors in a hallway, or opening and closing (i.e. with the new HOPE regulations the college path suddenly became slammed shut for many). We could do stop motion. Anyway, all just ideas I wanted to get down before they left my brain.

Upcoming Art Show

AFSC Weekly Meeting

Tonight our group attended AFSC's weekly potluck meeting. We were a bit overwhelmed by all the information that was discussed, yet very inspired by this insight. You could see everyone was extremely well informed and passionate about the issues being discussed. Some of the agenda items included:

-Education and the Hope Scholarship

-Student/Parent Privacy Act

-Student Art Contest

-Campus Outreach

-MYV (Migrant Youth Voice)

-Grants

-SAT tutoring

-March 19th Rally

First Day of Shooting

On Saturday, February 26th, I (T.J. posting here) made the trip down to Macon, GA so that I could attend (and film parts of) the statewide meeting of the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition (GPJC). We had inquired about the event at our first meeting with Tim, and he was kind enough to extend an invitation if we thought we could use some of the information and footage for our project. While I was the only one that could make it, this turned out to be fine as the meeting had a small group of people (about 10), and since this is a new camera for me I needed to practice anyway.

The AFSC of Atlanta is just one group that makes up the statewide network of the GPJC, a group that had a lot of success in building towards a large cooperative, but that has seen participation wane in recent years, especially during and after the campaign and election of Barack Obama (which many in the network were involved in heavily). Tim seems to be a driving force behind keeping the group alive, and his leadership, speaking, and teaching skills were on display at the small meeting. Discussion focused mostly on rebuilding and re-energizing the GPJC. Here's a link to AFSC Atlanta's official blog with a post about the meeting.

All this being said, its doubtful much of the footage obtained will be useful in our final project. While a focus on the GPJC and Tim Franzen as an individual activist could be interesting, for this short term work my thought is that we will be better served zeroing in as soon as possible on a detailed and personal story coming directly out of the Atlanta AFSC, in particular the SCAP (Student Non-violent Career Alternatives) program if this remains an option the group is open too.

In the coming days we need to lay out a production schedule, communicate with Tim, and begin to develop a treatment or outline for the project. Time is unfortunately not something we have a lot of in this particular case, so we'll want to narrow in on exactly what we hope to do as soon as possible.