Project Video Eldorado


‘Video Eldorado’


Other prospective names; ‘Keep on rolling’, ‘The Magic Bus’, ‘The Andes Caravan’


Video Eldorado is a project on the road involving a mobile studio and 6 young people: one from the Basque region, a Spanish girl, two English girls and a french-canadian, all aged between 22 and 26, of these, the majority are documentary film-makers. It will take place in a modified school mini-bus, which will be intrinsicly part of the adventure to cross 16 countries, spanning all 3 Americas. The journey will begin in Québec in January 2009 and end 6 months later in Ushuaїa, the ‘terra del fuego’ in Argentina. The aim of the project will be to meet and help young people where they will benefit from cinema and photography workshops including other art activities that we will provide to various impoverished communities. Furthermore, it will be to collect funds for UNICEF by way of these workshops, which will give the young people a voice so that they can tell their story in their own words, make known their points of view, their preoccupations, their road out of poverty whilst being faced with current social issues, all through the creation of videos.


Intentions


‘This trip affirms our needs to act for the good of human beings and their surroundings, to understand our differences and for a just experience.

We are leaving to discover other populations and their countries, and to show another perspective on our planet.’


The motivation behnd this concept is to be open to discovering new cultures and especially to meet, greet, share and really live something tangible with the local people. All things considered, even just the idea of havng new experiences is motiation enough for anyone. However in our case we also want to deeply invest ourslves into a human project with moral value, which will create another dimension to our experience and expose the idea of ‘ethical tourism’ to viewers. Being a young filmmaker myself, and mainly focused on social documentaries, I have long been captivated by the Wapikoni Mobile project; this kind of ‘social mission’ makes us want to invest ourselves in a project of the same kind. Video Eldorado rouses our inmost passions, cinéma, photoraphy, art, travel, and the social aspects of the world we live in.


In this way, our team has been working for several weeks to make this project come about.





Documentary production


Video Eldorado will manifest itsef as an independent documentary film , co-produced by ‘Les Films De La Bobine Chera’ and ‘Production Dreamage’ and will be in the same vein as ‘Bonne chance’, a film by Marie Genevieve-Chabot, which was co-produced by the Canadian National Film Corporation. The tight production schedule of this project means that our monetary plan will be based solely on private sponsorship. However it will be after our return that we will aim to develop the post-production financed by public institutions.

Throughout the trip, we will film our endeavours in the communities we visit with the mobile studio, or just our ventures out on the road.


Video and Photography workshops


We plan to give video and photography workshops to young people aged around 10-25 that come from impovershed comunities. To work in cooperation with the non-profit organisations of Québec seems essential to us to be able to integrate sufficiently. We anticipate giving one workshop a week per country, making a total of around 15 film workshops. This will take the shape of a public projection, in the communities, where we will show the videos made by the locals at the end of every visit.


The itinerary of workshops has not yet been decided.


Collection of funds for UNICEF


Public projections of all the films created will be organised in the large cities we travel through throughout our trip. The idea of such an approach being to give a voice to the young people of underprivileged communities and to make viewers conscious of the sometimes difficult situations these communities suffer. A public donation will be proposed further to these videos. Furthermore, working closely with the local media will be necessary to make our projects and intentions known.

It will also be possible to give donations on our website for those who follow our project from further away.


Why such a project?


We believe we possess the necessary expertise in the fields of film and photography to take such a project right to the end and to its full potential. Because we want to get across our passion for video, cinema and for people, those who have neither the chance or the luxury to have access or to be able practice such a discipline. On top of this we wish to meet people who are really part of their communities and make films with them in the hope of showing and experience, a dream, an opinion, or a creation through cinema.

Video Eldorado means helping people but also to sew the seeds of hope, and dreams.



Video Eldorado sur Internet

Even before film, there is the ever-present notion of sharing information instantly. The media of film, whilst also being a way of sharing information, it only represents the edited result of extensive production procedures imposed by this format. However these days, as film-makers borne of the digital age, we wish to leave traditional methods behind by making a film and distributing it in a way that integrates it as far as possible into our evermore digital and ‘instant’ society.

In this way it is extremely important for us to exibit the ideas that we have compiled over the journey of exploration that is ‘Video Eldorado’ and to share them directly; i.e. not when the film has been the distance and is finished completely, but as and when it is happening.

The possibilities of the Internet will enable us also to share a large part of the filmed elements that cannot be placed satisfactorally in the final structure of the film. This could be abandoned chain of thought, or even moments on a tangent to the original directorial structure that may not be included in the final montage, but still however hold much interest to the public. The final cut will only represent the tip of the iceberg of the whole concept, so why sacrifice the biggest part of a huge quantity of information? Therefore it seems to us that it cannot, and should not be done in any other way.



Virtual Video Eldorado


A large part of the dossier that we propose to upload on to the Internet onto our website will take the form of episodes of between 2 and 10 minutes. This could mean essentially films created with the young people, extracts of the experience in general with the inhabitants of the communities we visit, and the events or occurrences encountered, commentaries on the social problems or simply amazing moments. However we wish to underline that before all things we are interested in making small video extracts and that the content of these will give us a glimpse of the featured participants that our documentary research has led us to, or will lead us to encounter.

As far as possible, the content will be transmitted on the website at the same pace as the film is being made. We will try to share our experience directly following a weekly program. Of course it is also true that nothing may appear on the site over a week or two sometimes, but in order to hold the interest of our followers and to balance the flow of information we will take it upon ourselves to try and maintain the upkeep of our site regularly. Moreover, the members of the team, all being familiar with cameras, editing, as well as the Internet, the problems of managing the technical material over time we feel will hardly pose a problem. The only inconvenience that we will encounter will be access to and the quality of the Internet over our trip.

In this way we will create a trilingual website (french, english and spanish) we will make a few episodes featuring the preparation and pre-production, with aim of sharing our experiences and encounters with the largest audience possible. The website will be of an original design and straying away from the norm. It will take inspiration from the self-made website of the actor Jeff Bridges, every page will be drawn by hand (except film extracts of course) giving originality and character.

Furthermore, a detailed Internet marketing project will be launched to transmit the project

to its full potential. E.g multi-format applications will be used as well as the more obvious Youtube, Viméo and Daily Motion.


Potential partenership with ‘Parole Citoyenne’


Finally, if we take a look at other existing websites ‘Parole Citoyenne’ can offer us a respected exchange platform between individuals who speak out and find their voices. With this in mind, we feel our episodes will find a justified place within ‘Parole Citoyenne’ and, as fil-makers, we wish to participate in the creation of a way to share our project with the online community.


The group and its participants


The team is comprised of a multinational mix of 4.5 countries (the ‘half’ country refers to the fact that we do not wish to deny the Basque region of its own identity!) These people have all featured in my lif at some point throughout my travels or my studies abroad.


-Nicola Bannatyne, UK Studies in Languages, Art, Science and translation

-Claire Wilson, UK Studies in Visual arts and Photography

-Francois Guinaudeau FR, Studies in Cinema

-Jon Egana-Larraaga ESP Studies in Cinema

-Vanessa Ayala Medina ESP Studies in Design, Publicity, public relations, and cinema

-Benjamin Gadoury QC Studies in Cinema


Requested collaboration from Wapikoni Mobile


Funds, advice on technical aspects, preparation of budget, distribution plan, administrative support, creation/ conception and development of website, premises.


Schedule


Development and pre-production for the following 4 months:


AUG- SEPT



OCT



NOV



DEC



JAN



Budget


The financial structure is being developed. We estimate the budget to be around $40 000 for 6 people over 6 months all-inclusive.