More than a Movie: Social Issues and Film

Christopher Gebhardt, Executive Vice President and General Manager, TakePart

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Christopher Gebhardt
Participant media was founded by Jeff Skoll, who was the founding President of eBay. And uh.. Jeff's vision was to create entertainment that inspires and compels social change. And uh.. that was about five years ago. We've made, or have been part of making 20 films, including uh.. "Syriana, Good Night, Good Luck," "An Inconvenient Truth," uh.. "Charlie Wilson's War," "Kite Runner," uh.. "The Soloist," "The Visitor," "Food Inc," "The Cove," uh.. and "The Informant." Our mission doesn't end with you seeing the film, it's really about that's the starting

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point of the conversation. So what's happening from a technology standpoint is really an amazingly wonderful thing for participant, and the types of films that we make, and the thing that we talk a lot about uh.. in terms of how technology meets traditional media, is that this is really Storytelling 3.0. This is the next wave of storytelling, and the last 150, 200, 300 years, if you will, of media has really been about

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top-down, hierarchical media. Someone creating a piece of content and delivering to you. Uhm.. it's almost like technology's en-- technology's enabling us to go back to the original storytelling in which the participant, the person's who's consuming the media, who's being told the story, became an active part of the story. Because what they did, and in an oral tradition, where all media comes from, they took the media and passed it on. What technology is really

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enabling us to do now is to start with a- a piece of traditional media, a film.

THE COVE

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Christopher Gebhardt
And then hand it off to the consumer of that media, and do something with it. But in doing that, they're building. They're adding more layers to it. So it doesn't end, it keeps going, and by doing that we end up with something that's more authentic, more powerful, more compelling. And hopefully, in the end, causes more people to get involved and be involved with that — with
<clip from "The Cove">

Christopher Gebhardt
The film has a tremendous ability.

"A Stunning, Shocking Story..."

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Christopher Gebhardt
The medium has an ability to really uh.. distill a complicated subject down to a series of very strong emotional impulses. And the fact that you're sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers for two hours in the dark, you — it creates this communal experience that's also very personalized in nature. And so what we find is that if you can marry information and uhm.. kind of knowledge about a- a topic with that emotionality, you're creating a very

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strong bond. But even that isn't strong enough to get somebody from that point of being in the film, of watching a film, to the point of action. So what we saw in the research that we did leading up to the launch of our website, TakePart, is that we needed to look for ways to connect with somebody in the theater. And so "The Cove" was the first chance for us to do that. And it worked tremendously well in terms of providing a pathway for immediate connection, and immediate action.

...The Film Itself is An Act of Heroism."

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Christopher Gebhardt
We integrated a short code into "The Cove," And we had uh.. over a nine percent response rate from people in the theater, pulling out their phones just before the credits ran, and texting in to get further information, and to enlist in social action campaign that we had built around the film. So getting that immediate response is a huge thing, but it's a digital connection and digital channel that

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allows you to do that. And now we have almost 500,000 people that have signed the petition to end this dolphin slaughter.

Producers: Peter Berkow & Michael Hoopingarner

A Bedford/St. Martin's Production