Card: A Bedford/St.
Martin's Production
Card: More than a Movie:
Social Issues and Film
Card: Christopher
Gebhardt, Executive Vice President and General Manager, TakePart
0:00:08.9
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
0:00:39.5
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
0:01:08.7
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
0:01:37.2
enabling us to do now is to start with a- a piece of
traditional media, a film.
Card: THE COVE
0:01:42.0
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.
Card: "A Stunning,
Shocking Story..."
0:02:08.8
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
0:02:38.7
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.
Card: ...The Film Itself
is An Act of Heroism."
<clip from film>
0:03:13.8
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
0:03:40.3
allows you to do that. And now we have almost 500,000 people
that have signed the petition to end this dolphin slaughter.
Card: Producers: Peter
Berkow & Michael Hoopingarner
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movie_social issues and film SAFE VERSION.mov ####