 Having this session in just a moment, this is Yvonne Hayning joining us from Lights Camera Help, which is co-founder and board president of LCH or as we know it on Twitter at NPSilm. And Rich is joining us today from Austin, he is one of the founders of Lights Camera Help. He is also trained as a dramatic writer and a journalist and a programmer so we welcome his background in pre-production and in technical planning as we begin to tell our stories together. Just a moment around what is TS Diggs and the digital storytelling challenge before we get started. For those of you who are new to TechSoup, this is our third year doing the TechSoup digital storytelling challenge where we welcome nonprofits to create one minute videos or five photo flicker sets that help tell their story in creative and wonderful ways. We award great prizes and we offer many different resources including this webinar, number of tweet chats on Tuesdays at 11 a.m. and nonprofits live that will happen next Wednesday at 11 a.m. And we encourage you to sign up for these resources and take advantage of the amazing experts coming together to help you learn how to produce quality video together. If you go to www.tsdiggs.org you can find out more about the challenge that's also hashtag TSDiggs anywhere on Twitter you will find out a little bit more including great prizes from Adobe, creative suite, flip cameras, we are using great tools from Citrix and Blazon and you will see more of the amazing companies, nonprofits and experts who have come together to bring this challenge to you. With that I am going to pass the microphone to our amazing speaker today, Rich Vazquez from Lights Camera Help. Thank you, Rich. Thank you. Well, thank you all for coming today. As was mentioned I went to school originally for screenwriting and I paid for that by doing technology work which ended up paying for the rest of my life. So that keeps me busy but I also work with Cine Las Americas as their webmaster and kind of presenting things online there. For the Alston Film Festival I read scripts every year for their screenplay competition and of course for Lights Camera Help we screen films at our festival annually. So between those in the past, every year basically I am exposed to hundreds of stories whether it is through the ones submitted as scripts or the ones submitted as films of Lights Camera Help and my hope is to just kind of relay how I perceive a story and hopefully that will help you kind of dissect some of the things that you see in your organization as well as as you are witnessing other people's stories. I think one of the polls we asked why are you here? Are you here to hear a story or tell a story or learn how to tell a story? And I think when we look at it we will see the kind of relationship stories play for each of us throughout time. So that's the first thing I want to talk about is kind of the theory of story and then I want to do it more practical to your organization. So how can you look at your organization or your surroundings? And then I'm going to show you some examples of kind of exploring different story types that some nonprofits have used and different resources that you might have available or might not have available to you. And then finally we are going to explore intellectual property and some resources you can get to flesh out your presentation with more multimedia. So just telling a story for a nonprofit is like telling any story. There are basic elements to any story. There's a style. If you go to a beat poetry there's a certain style there. If you go to a stage there's a style. And then even within those there are different approaches you can take and you need to think about as an organization how you're going to approach that. And so setting, I've always been a fan even when I was in film school of a single setting, kind of the Woody Allen. And that's just pure cheapness on my behalf. It helps you to kind of restrict the budget for one. But it also sets a tone so you have to be careful what kind of tone you're setting. There are some examples I'll tweet out later where you can just look at the detail of the room and see different things every single time you watch it. But the setting can make people feel differently whether you're in a church, on the street, in a car, in traffic. All of those evoke different emotions and different angst and different baggage and different goals. So there are some themes for everything you create. The theme is just a broad idea or a message. I think as nonprofit workers we're all familiar with themes, whether we're trying to absorb others or get others involved with the theme of our organization and kind of encourage others to participate. So the plot is the thing that moves you from one place to the other in the story. So what's going to be happening? What's the action? And of course that's heavily involved with the setting. So those are two of the physical dynamics you have in the story. What do you want to be happening and where do you want that to take place? So those are two physical things you do have to account for before you get started. And video particularly, you have to consider things like if you're going to be on a street, have you made the investment in sound equipment? If you're going to be at an event, have you made an investment in sound equipment? There are different kinds of mics that you can attach or if you're okay with just having a microphone held up in that particular event or if they're standing in front of a microphone presenting, but always think about sound when you think about your setting. When we talk about intellectual property later, setting will come up again because there are some things that you shouldn't use without permission. And of course character is the third physical thing you have to account for. Yeah, a lot of people, you can't really have a plot without characters, but it's not usual. And usually even if you have something like a car that's the main thing, that car becomes the character. Sometimes the setting can become the character. One thing I didn't really appreciate until I got involved with Lights, Camera, Help was the fact that documentaries, PSAs, they all have characters. But especially with documentaries or even a news format, you have to realize that wherever you're asking the audience to attach to for a certain amount of time, they need to have an interest. They need to be going somewhere and they need to be doing something. So I want to look at why we tell stories. In the poll question, I asked to learn more about storytelling or to tell a story. It looks like 82% said to learn more about storytelling. And 17 to tell a story and one to hear a story. And other ones who didn't choose to tell a story or to hear a story might wonder why that does what even be in there. And I always tell people that everybody's telling a story at any given moment. So whether you're at work, whether you're with your family, whether you're in public, the way you dress, the way you carry yourself, you're always telling a story. You're telling them I'm here to buy something, don't cheat me. You're telling them I'm a professional, treat me with respect and listen to what I have to say. So there's a lot of dynamics involved with telling a story. And while this discussion of theory might seem a little broad, it's important to understand because you're finding ways and inspecting ways to attach to the audience and to pull them in. So when you look at the diversity of how stories are told, you have more resources available to you. And I think you'll start to pay a little bit more attention to some of the potential resources in your everyday activity that are available to tell your story. Family, if you go to some family gatherings, eventually there's the old folks gathering at the table and sometimes the young folks. But we're just basically telling, hey, you remember that time when you were 14 and you went into the woods and you thought there wasn't there, but they just were counting. And it's a habit that we just do. We just sit around the fireplace and the family reunions or family holidays, we start reminiscing. So that's something we just do. We start telling stories as part of family dynamics. To keep memory alive, there are some epic poems out there. I think that's also attached to the family, but also just other elements in life. But people tell stories to be remembered, to remember things, and to keep a relationship tangible and to kind of keep that string between people alive. History is along the same lines as all of those three. I remember there was some Scotsman visiting a couple of years ago and sure enough, one o'clock in the morning drinking Scotch, they start singing and citing epic poems about the history and that they all had it memorized and they were all expecting it. And that history won't be forgotten. Morality, there was a recent debate on, I'll try to send this link out later, but it was on slate. They were complaining about the Puritan ethic of having to learn something when you tell a story. But the fact is, is that it's heavily embedded in our culture. When you get to the end of the story, you ask the question, what did you learn? Not all stories necessarily have that, but it is a common, especially in our American culture, it's a common approach to stories. And I think in most cultures, it's there at some level at least. Religion is another one. We have our standard religious stories that we believe and then we have, you most religions tend to have like a secondary set such as parables or a collection of histories around the religion. The final one is entertainment. And of course, that's the final one, those are the blockbusters. It makes news when a documentary becomes a blockbuster and that tells you how how common that is. It's not very common. So entertainment we use to escape, whether it's from the day, sometimes in such as horror films or adventure stories, you're escaping from the situation that you just got yourself into. So one of the great things about that type of story is that the audience is attached to someone, they're attached to a situation. And they go along for the ride because they know at the end they're going to escape. The sensibilities of American audiences always say that they will definitely get out of the situation. In some other countries, it's very common for films not to end so gracefully. So that's something you need to look at when you're talking about who you're telling the story to. You can think about all of these things. If it's about the family, what is that target audience? Think about family. How do they view their history? Is there anything in your film that might affect or maybe misrepresent or raise a trigger on something? If you have a sad ending, for instance, in a Hollywood film, for the entertainment sector, that's not going to go off very well. That's going to be very hard to get that film made and most people won't even want to talk to you about it. So while we can debate whether or not a moral is required or whether or not any of these other elements are required, something that is common is transition. I love this phrase, the liminal state, but it's this place where you're moving from one place to the other. When you grab an audience and start talking to them and put something in front of them, you're saying, hey, give me a minute of your time. Let me take you someplace. So they don't know what they're going to get into, but from that opening scene and the opening first few words, you have to start to engage them and to set some expectations of what is about to happen and where they might be going to. Generally speaking in films, when you're creating fantasy, for instance, or a magical story, there are always roles, like the genie. There's three roles and you can't wish for X and X. So if it's a longer journey, if it's longer than a minute, even if it's a short one, but if it's an extended story, you have to set the guidelines and those first moments you can't set up a bunch of roles and then just randomly break it later because you're waking them up out of that transition. So you have to figure out, and this goes back to theme and style, basically the tone of what you're doing. How are you going to carry yourself throughout this story? So I want to go back and look at those five elements again. This is just more from a practical perspective. The theme you can think about in terms of your programs. At Lights, Camera, Help, we teach classes. We have a festival. We do some volunteer matching. So those are things we can grab the thing out. What's the theme of those classes we teach? What are people asking in them? If you have a soup kitchen, what are some of the themes that happen during the activity? What you want to do is you want to look basically at that program from beginning to end. Corporations, when they talk about diversity these days, it's not so much racial or gender diversity. They extend it to mean when you're coming up with a good idea, make sure that the administrative team is exposed to it at some level. Make sure that the technology team is exposed to it at some level. That allows you to bounce ideas further. So when you're working in a non-profit organization, sometimes it's easy, especially depending on your role or how big your office is, to become insular. I always refer to it as intellectual inquiry. But basically you've got the same 10 people, and if you're always repeating the same 10 things back and forth to each other, then you're going to believe yourself and you're going to think it's the best thing in the world. What you need to do is you need to go through your programs and think about who's touched by them, who are the stakeholders, who's on the giving and the receiving end, and who are all the people involved in the delivery. And I think you'll find some, I think you'll find characters in there, you'll find plots. But you're also going to find information that people want to know about your organization. I think the mission statement is probably the biggest connection to theme. That's something that you can just look at and you can say, hey, this is what we should be communicating. Now that might not be the goal of that particular film that you're making. It could be to educate people about a program and say, hey, come on by, come in. But the mission is typically operating everything you do as a non-profit anyway. So I think it's appropriate to always pull that out, read this, and then get started, because that's what you should be doing for anything related to your non-profit. Another one with theme is evangelism. We had a class last week, I believe, and when I asked what they wanted to tell, they started with, we believe that, I believe it was everyone deserves a home. We believe everyone should have access to good health care. We believe that all children should be safe. We believe that all women should be safe. We believe that all men should be safe. We believe that technology should be approachable by all people. That's more of a broad approach, and it sets a different road for you to go down, as far as creating your film. I think looking at these three things when you're trying to discuss your theme with what you're going to do, is a good thing. As far as plot goes, this is the transition moment. When I find you, you're on this side of the road. When I'm leaving the audience, I'm going to leave them on the other side of the road, and something will have happened in between. You have the option between creating a short moment for that person. I'm a huge fan of short stories. Garcia Marquez, for some reason I just can't read as long works, so I went and I got a bunch of short stories, and I love that. Of course, there's a long option. All of that relates to budget, of course, and the investment of all of the stakeholders and participants. There is the documentary format, both short and long. The PSA is interesting, because I used to complain it. We didn't get a lot of narratives, and I had to backtrack on that. By narrative and the film festival, and I think film and even literature community, that's often basically just what you would think of as fiction. The fact is that there are a lot of PSAs out there that make up a story and tell you the story and show someone on the screen going through something, performing something, succeeding over something. All of that is creating fiction. I'm a big fan of narratives. I think it makes you hunker down a little bit more for creativity, but sometimes the documentary format of just reporting what you have accessible to you is very worthwhile, especially to get started. And if your primary goal is to get the story out, you need to first look at your resources and what you have to work with. And of course, with all of that, there's a call to action. The point of telling your story is to not only move your character from one point to the other, but to also move the audience. This is where you need to think about where do we want to move the audience to? Is it to their pockets? Is it to the volunteering station? But keep the call to action in mind. And there's never any excuse to... I can't think of a single reason why you wouldn't end with at least a slide or an image of what someone can do to help your organization. Now, as far as style goes, I don't know if any of you have seen the Charity Water videos, but go to YouTube, look for Charity Water. I would put those under the rockin' category, as far as the style goes. They're very fast-paced. They're very musical. They've got a great rhythm going. Shocking. Our first year, we had two animal rights groups, or yeah, animal rights films showing. One was, I believe, called Fowl, and it was about the chicken and egg industry. I still feel guilty when I eat eggs to this day. It was a very graphic film. It's very impactful. Some of us will never forget, for sure. And we literally had people crying in the audience. At the same time, we had a film about puppy mills, and they took a serious approach. I think instead of shocking, they would be under the Hope category. So, from their perspective, they probably saw puppies being in very poor conditions, but in thinking about how they're going to relate to their partners, how they're going to relate to their donors, and how they're going to move the audience. The two organizations with the same goal took two different approaches. One was to shock the audience and say, oh, my God, this has to stop now. Let me do something about it. It's just a wrong period. And it was a huge moral statement. The other organization didn't even show where the puppies were kept, so they really didn't go into that. I didn't ask them, but thinking back at it, when I mentioned partners earlier, you have to consider that in order to fulfill your mission, sometimes you're teaming up, I guess you might call them the competition, but they might have a deal with the puppy mills to arrange adoption at a certain point. In that case, you can't really go for shock. You can't go into their facilities and say, hey, look at this evil man. You have to work with them. So really, the story picked up after the puppies were picked up. They did describe some of the problems of the puppy mills. They didn't just whitewash it, but they also didn't go inside and do an expose. So you need to think about relationships as you're thinking about your style. You need to think about who you're reaching out to. Will the charity water videos with a lot of driving music and rhythm and flashing images affect a 70-year-old as much as a 25-year-old? Probably not. Is that their audience? Is it going to affect who they're really targeting? Probably not. So it's okay to be shocking, to be rocking, to have hope. And the other two, of course, are funny and serious. So what tone are you going to take? There are some things that some people just aren't ready to laugh at yet. And while comedians like to say, hey, that's what comedy is, that's, you have to consider something different. You can't just hold up comedy for the sake of comedy and hope it won't splash back on your organization. You're building relationships through your story. You're sustaining relationships through your story and you're extending your organization. So think about who you're talking to and what kind of reaction they might have to the style you're taking. Because it's very easy for that to splash back quite accidentally. So the setting, these are the low-hanging fruits of the settings for an organization, meaning they're easily accessible. You have the office. You have the people you can talk to every day for a quick interview. Why are you working here? Why did you volunteer so much? The programs, you have the people that are executing the programs, as well as the people on the services. The receiving of that program. You also have public events. We had a film frenzy a few weeks back where people made films within 48 hours and then we showed them at one of the cinemas here. And there was one group I was sitting in while they were doing their planning session. And they had their executive director was giving a speech at this massive gathering of this convention. Just happened to be that weekend. And they hadn't even thought of recording it. And this is someone who I believe was a refugee and went through everything that was centered on their organization. So it would be a great display of their mission, what kind of person is helping, what's driving the people to continue helping and things like that. But sometimes when you're just so involved with getting something done, you don't think to pause and say, hey, can we record this for a moment? And use it to tell our stories again later. So think about your activity. I'll show you some examples later of, as far as I'm concerned, it seemed like someone just basically walking around doing their job and recording. And then they edited it later and created a great funny film character. As a writer, like I said, I believe everything is a character. So the setting is a character, anything you can look at and anything that's interacting as a goal, as something good, as something bad. But coming back from the theoretical for a moment and looking at the organizations, who are the characters available to you? Whether you're creating a fictional story and a PSA to just show a slice of life or if you're focusing on your program for an interview, always be looking at who you're interacting with, who is your organization touching. So you have volunteers. These are always interesting characters, I think for everybody. They come to you with various commitments and they come to you for various reasons. So sometimes gathering those stories can be interesting because one thing you're always going to need is more volunteers. So even if it's just to capture why you volunteer or what you love about this organization, someone who's freely given their time is a good place to start because that's basically a donor that's giving up themselves. For the clients, those people who receive from your programs or purchase the service from your programs, what made them decide to reach into their pocket or to walk through your doors? What pushed them on that transition? Public supporters, these are your donors, these are your volunteers. These are the people who just like what you're doing. Some people just love an organization. The executive director and board president, David Neff is going to give one of the seminars. For T.S. Diggs. So make sure to register for that. But me and him, we have two different personalities. If I need someone with a bigger personality to execute on something publicly, I'm definitely going to put him out there before I go out there. And there are other situations where I might be good. We've received some entries in the film festival that are just totally awesome. The entire series of the show. And then it wraps up and they put the executive director in front of the camera for another 10 minutes talking about the program. It looked like he was just getting over the flu. He was in an awful suit. But there was nothing pleasant about the experience. Now there's always a need to describe and to provide numbers and to have a figurehead. The figurehead doesn't have to be the only person talking. If you have someone who either isn't comfortable on camera, isn't comfortable in front of people or just has an awkward presentation as much as they might love the job and love being out there, you want to consider tempering that. So you can have 10 minutes of information about the program but go back to your volunteers. Go back to your staff. Go back to your clients. Maybe have it be 10 minutes but mix it in with things that the clients are saying and things that other people are saying so that you're not stuck looking at one head on the screen the entire time. So back to the poll. Why are we here? It was the smallest percentage on the poll. 1% to hear a story. But I would say that the moment all of you registered, you registered to hear someone tell a story about storytelling. I do think that the 17% that said they wanted to tell a story, those would be the people asking questions and interacting. But again, everything is a story. One of the things I think would be useful, one of the things that I used to do that really bothered people is I would wait to see a movie before I write the script. Well, I would read the script before I would go see a movie and everyone would say, well, doesn't that ruin it? Well, when you think about it, does reading a book ruin a movie? For some people it might. But generally speaking, we're okay with it because it's different. I think by exploring some of these themes and by looking at some of the things we've talked over, if you start looking at the threads between action between individuals, between the programs in your organization, I think you're going to see some threads and I think you're going to pay more attention to it. So when I read a script before I go see a movie, I can see some of the threads in the story and then I can see how it changes. Screenwriters are often told there's three versions of their screenplay. Starting with the version they write, the other two versions they have no control over. When you go to execute, then it's in the director's hands. When you come up with that plan, you have to be okay with that plan changing so long as you have your central goal and this is where kind of reading the mission statement and maybe creating a small mission statement for the film or a goal for that film and executing on that. But looking at all of those threads, it'll help you. It seems a little bit tedious and for some people it might be, but paying attention to all of those threads will really help your organization. The types of connections we're building is between volunteers and a non-profit organization. Sometimes you just want to create word of mouth. That goes a long way. And some of that's brand recognition, right? So just having people know who you are so that if they're going to volunteer or if they're going to give, they know that you exist and that you're trustworthy, that you've been around and hopefully they know what you do. There are some organizations that I've seen films for where the first maybe five films I saw, I had no idea, and it's well-known organizations, I had no idea what they did. I knew what they didn't like. I knew what, you know, and their evangelism was working as far as that we believe. And I got that portion, but I didn't get why I should give them five dollars or 200 dollars. And then finally they produced one that told me exactly what they did and I was like, this is awesome. That's a great organization. So, you know, drawing those lengths and looking at how you want to draw those lengths between yourself and these various types of groups out there and the various people you interact with is always an important thing. This is basically marketing as well, but it's storytelling for sure. So, as far as creating a production, I would say keep it simple. We could go into excruciating detail and I'm going to go over a tool in a minute that will let you do that if you want to. But basically, who are you going to involve? What's the length of what you're doing and what's time commitment for those people that you're going to involve? Filming takes a lot longer than it seems like sometimes. And I think when we go over the editing portion with TS digs that you'll find out those exact ratios, but you take a lot of footage sometimes and end up with just a minute. So, find out who you're talking to, if it's an executive director and you're going to have them be a talking head for 10 minutes and then edit it down later. You might decide that you want it in two different settings. I've been reported for a piece where I think I said the same thing about 15 times. So, it was paid maybe a minute long spiel. And while they think, okay, they're just going to report me saying a sentence, that took me, I think I was there an hour. So, there are other things going on, of course, but make sure that whoever you're involving, you're respectful of their time. And you've talked about the staff of who's going to be executing on the technical side and make sure that you understand that commitment. And that's just respectful and it will help you reuse that resource in the future. What is the action? I was in a production of Handland once where this was in a high school and we used real sorts. But in order to do that, we had to have an ambulance on call sitting in the back the entire time ready to act if one of us accidentally flung our sword. So, what activity is going to be taking place in this story? Do you need any resources for that? Who needs to deliver something? This is like event planning. If you're creating an event for your organization, what do you need to fulfill that and what safeguards or backup plans do you need? The setting is usually involved with that. Can you do that action in that setting? Is that setting going to be noisy? Where is it going to take place? And what is your time? So, if you're going to be excitable, it's not uncommon for a bank robber or something like that scene to be filmed by a student and for the cops to interrupt because they didn't know what was happening. I'm not sure how you pronounce this but at the lower left you can see the spelling. I always say Celtics but it's C-E-L-T-X. And but look at this to do a production catalog if you want. It's for script writing. I would not get bogged down but it has a lot of tools in it and it's freely available. But remember that toys can be evil. So it can just take you down a rabbit hole and you won't be able to finish the project. So just remember who, what, where, and when. Scale to the project but always keep it simple. Thank you Rich. That's a fantastic way to start. We have some great questions coming in and I would love to be able to take a moment to first off honor our guests for giving us some interesting questions around how to do things simple and effective and low cost especially for non-cost. That's how to be as resourceful as possible. We've had questions coming in around budgeting and how to resource low cost software. It sounds like the tool you just described is really available. And we will also make available links to a handful of tools that you can get through TechSoup from Flipcams to software that can help make that available for you at low cost. For those of you we've had questions coming in around how can we make these processes participatory with money poor communities. And I feel like there are many different opportunities in this community to make use of the resources available to us. So as we're looking at examples, we're looking at intellectual property in the second half of this hour. I would love to hear your ideas on how to do it effectively, do it efficiently and not spend a lot of money in the process. So as far as budgeting, I'm always a fan of starting at the resources you have. The example of when someone was giving a speech and they didn't think to record it. I'm involved with one film festival who has a lot of directors come in and they never record the conversations that they're having anyway or the panels that they're having anyway. Something like a Flipcam goes a long way. There is a... We're probably going to have to skip through some of the examples I have. But the Big Cat sounds, I'll send out a link on Twitter for this later. But in this situation, this person just walked through their sanctuary and recorded what was happening. And it was a funny, it's a great film and it was very effective. But involving those people who are already there and trying to get those mundane things that you might be overlooking, I think is the best way. Check out your public access channel nearby. We have a great one in Austin where you can get resources, some technical resources for sound and cameras very effectively. But it's basically keeping it simple and looking at your existing resources. Right, so it sounds like you're also empowering some of your volunteers and field staff to get out with their mobile devices or whatever HD camera that they can come across. Are there specific low-cost tools that you recommend in your workshops? There are some websites that I can go through for getting images and getting sounds and getting some video. There are several of those I can go through. I believe there's a codec. David actually knows more about the specific technology for actual production. So I think it would be worthwhile. We can also include the link to Kel-Tex as well. So we've had a few questions coming in about Kel-Tex and where to find that. So that sounds like a great follow-up. So we can look at some of those links together after this webinar as well. Same with some of the videos. You've been showing some great screenshots from videos and it's great to go back and watch and see those cats in action. We have a couple more questions. We have one around, are there guidelines? This is from Lydia Johnson. Are there guidelines for how many scenes, characters, or settings are appropriate for a one-minute film? I don't think so. You just have to make sure. This goes back to who your audience is. If you're hitting a bunch of 70-year-olds, you don't want to change your scene every couple of seconds. Do realize that the more you change, remember what I said about doing a one-minute line and being there an hour. Just because it's a one-minute film, if you have 10 scenes, I would put it aside at least 10 hours, for instance, just to record those. So that's something you have to consider. Just consider your time commitment primarily and the attention span of your audience and what they're willing to go through. Something like Charity Water is very driving, very fast, and it's very effective, but there are also ones that are just quiet. It really is going to affect your tone. Right. It also affects the budget and the amount of time and the number of people that need to come together in order to make it effective. So it depends on what resources you have on hand. We also have people asking about, for the TechSoup Digital Storytelling Challenge, if we take entries from Animoto for a cause. Animoto is a great way to bring in photos and bring them into a story that can be shared quickly and easily. In my experience, an Animoto video doesn't take but a few hours at most. So we do welcome those entries. You can do a five-photo set via Flickr. You can do videos in any video tool that you see appropriate for your organization. And you can send in videos that are not necessarily in English as well, but we do ask that you please subtitle them so that our judges know what you're doing. We very much want to promote our global audience and we want to encourage international nonprofits to get out and tell their story as well. So thank you for those of you who are asking questions. You've been giving some great questions over the course of the hour. Rich, I'm going to pass this back to you because you have a few more examples to show us, yes? Yeah. I'm going to go through these quickly because I'm running a bit long. Oops, going the wrong way. So this is a case where, sorry, this was a very simple phone we received one year and it's simply a phone call conversation with a young man talking with his would-be girlfriend. And you can see that all he does is he talks. There's some, you would call it animation or captioning going on, but it's a very simple and as he talks, the label is on the screen change and just watching that, unfortunately, seems extremely familiar and it's very relatable to some scenarios you might have seen, but it's one person, one conversation in one room and the editing after that. And that was from the Lovers Respect org. Big cat sounds. This is great. It's funny. You get the sounds of the cats just making the sounds they do on a regular basis. This was an adoption council and ad council campaign. This one is just a boy sitting next to his adopted father while his father is snoring and he looks up and smiles at him and then looks back at the TV, but he's just happy to be there. This is something that, I like this one because interracial adoption can be a hot button issue. And they didn't even really bring it up, but through their characters and setting, they kind of showed the young lady opening up her box and these are probably stereotypical that could address to any generation of any group, but you can see the mother is giving her a sweater just like hers. But the whole point of this campaign, this was a we believe and kind of an assuaging of fears. We believe you're scared of adopting because you might feel awkward, but it's okay to be awkward. Tale of Two Brothers. I'm going to sign out the link to this later. This had a lot of activity in it. Great characters. It's about 15 minutes long. Pure narrative. Had some ugly moments. Had some nice moments. Had some corruption of the heroes, if you will. But it was for the Los Angeles Urban League. And as far as budgeting goes, while you're watching this film, you'll see one of the characters gets a job at Mattel. I'm going to guess that they're probably donors of the LA Urban League and chances are they contributed to the budget. So you could look at how you can extend your existing relationships and maybe get a higher budget and include them in production. This is something that Ronald McDonald House here in Austin did last year. This is one of our winners in the film festival, but they used handkerpuppets. It was very good. It was very informative and very effective. I'm going to go over some resources, because we haven't done a lot of that yet. Copyright, as you know, means you can't touch my stuff. When I was in, when I went to Woodstock in 92, they had these security cameras at the front, and they really didn't ask me if I had a gun or anything else. They walked in, the metal detector would go off, and they would ask if you had a camera. So when I talked about finding that setting, when I talked about who you're going to have in there and how they're going to address, think about trademarks, think about personal image. Do you have permission to film that person? One of the most commonly sought after things for films is music. Jemendo, very good. They've been around a few years. I believe everything on this film, you can see, royalty free. Everything is reusable. For those of you who aren't familiar, there's a license called Creative Commons, and you can search, and what Creative Commons is, is it allows artists to say that people can use my work commercially or no, or they can change it or no. But if they're using Creative Commons license, it means that you can't tell them or you can't use it. I used a couple of slides, and you might have noticed some credits at the bottom left or right from the people who actually put those out there, and that was because they were Creative Commons, and they said, hey, use my stuff. So, Jemendo uses that Creative Commons license, and there's all kinds of styles of artists out here. CC Mixter is another one. That's what I like because you can choose just voices in the background, and there are... This isn't a kids safe site, so there's some hip hop and other music in there that are, you know, it's for adults. But there are lots of great music. A lot of music you can use is haunting ballads, and then what happens is... This is off the sample section is basically the instrumental, but they basically, and on this side, people upload their voice. Someone else uploads music, and then maybe a third person takes that voice with the music, and I've heard haunting melodies done to bluegrass, and then also done to a hip hop beat, and also done to techno. So, this is an interesting site. Is this time intensive? So, it might be something you have an intern do, or it might be something you just visit every once in a while and see what new was up in a certain genre and what you might be interested in. Flickr, well, the good thing to do is probably to start your search at the Creative Commons site. Google images, you can search. And here on the Creative Commons website, you have to go to explore and find CC licensed work, and this will help you find them on Flickr. This will help you find them on Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, or Wikimedia images. So, you can find images for slides or for snapshots. For the refugees that we were working with last week, they have some refugees from the Congo, so there were some slice of life pictures from the Congo that we were able to find that were freely available. So, if they were giving out facts about the Congo, then they could superimpose that on this image that is freely available. So, this is at search.creativecommons.org. This is a great starting place. Archive.org is probably one of the few places to get, say, archival images for free. I was given a talk where somebody wanted to know if they could use a Beverly Hillbilly's episode, and sure enough, a specific episode he was looking for was there. So, you can download excerpts of old films. Most of these are going to be black and white. There are some new things being created now that people are uploading, just like on YouTube. So, YouTube and archive.org. I believe Vimeo also has that setting. In creative commons, just make sure you look and you can always click through the license and find out what the restrictions are. If you're going to resell whatever you're creating, think twice and just double back and make sure that's okay. If this crossed out dollar sign means it's not. Typically speaking, you always just want to say who provided you with this. Another music source is Moby, the musician. He gives away music free for nonprofits. So, that's a great resource. A lot of times if you have local musicians, you can just approach them, especially if they're familiar with your organization and just ask them if you can use their music. As a non-profit, you're more likely to get a yes on that. Looking at the poll of does your organization have intellectual property, the answer is now it does after this competition. So, just remember that you're creating something copyrighted that something is going to be performed or put out there as well. You can license it creative commons. As a PSA, there's no reason for it not to be. But since this is a dense topic, I do want to open it up to questions sooner than later. Any questions on creative commons or intellectual property or finding those resources? We have an interesting question that came in earlier in the hour that deals with the makes of sensitive information and then telling an impactful story. Sarah Smith asks, we deal with veterans, many of whom have traumatic memories. How do we draw the line between respecting privacy and the need to tell the story of veterans and their families who are feeling isolated? You trailed off on the end there, sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. How do we draw the line between respecting privacy and the need to tell the stories of these veterans and their families who are feeling isolated in their communities? An approach which might not be always effective, you have to do it very carefully, is fictionalizing or emerging characters and coming up with a fictional representation of that based on reality. It is a very difficult thing to do. Some of the women resources organizations do a lot of interviews with shaded faces or someone off to the side. There are some things you can do with a shot to handle that. Or show hands. Hands can be a very personal thing, but aren't necessarily as revealing versus as safe. I would encourage you, if you're doing that type of situation, is to look at the StoryCorps project. They have great interview packets and formats for soliciting that type of story from somebody. Privacy comes down to the individual choice, so you really just have to work directly with that individual, which you're going to get their story. Right. And you made a very important note about releases. And there are release forms available on the web. We will try and put those also in our forums. And that will be a place where you want to make sure that you let people know how their video may be used later, if it's going to be put on YouTube, if it's going to be shared publicly. Please let people know as you're capturing them so that there is a clear line of respect all the way through the story. Right. You can have a public sign saying, for events, saying this is being recorded. But if you have a sensitive population, you just don't want to do that really, because you're building a relationship with those people and trying to sustain that. Yes. We've had some great questions coming in, and we're going to need to wrap up fairly shortly, but we want to take a bit more of the practical held twos. We've had a number of people asking about low-cost tools and resources, and we will be providing links to many of those over the course of the month, including links to our forums, where you can get questions answered about low-cost editing tools or sound production tools. If you are looking for discounted and donated products from TechSoup, you can do a search through techsoup.org. There are many tools for professional sound, professional video editing, and professional capture within the catalog there. So if you are a TechSoup member, we encourage you to go ahead and request product. If you are not a TechSoup member, please go ahead and sign up to be a member as a nonprofit organization who have access to many, many resources. I did just, sorry, I showed on my screen real quick, Audacity, that's a free sound editing. The professional tools that TechSoup has available are really great. So while some free tools might be good to get started, you definitely want to try to invest when you can, because those resources do take you up another level. Right, and you may want to choose to invest in a microphone while using something like your smartphone. You can use your existing resources, especially if you can get a high quality capture using something you have, just by adding a piece. It doesn't necessarily need to be that you have to buy a whole production suite in order to make a video. So we are going to be wrapping up, and I want to invite the rest of you who've been asking questions. We are going to do our best to get to as many of your questions on the TechSoup forums. And also in the upcoming webinars, we have two webinars coming up next week, as Rich mentioned earlier, his colleague David is hopping on to talk about production, and we will get more into these nuts and bolts and which programs to use, and how to do it, and how to make it look great. The following week, that will be, I believe, the 16th. If I remember correctly, we'll be with Erin, and Erin will be talking about post-production, and we will talk more about sharing and distribution. For those of you who missed the beginning of the hour, we are hosting a month-long digital storytelling challenge here with TechSoup. You can find out more information at www.tsdigs.org, and this challenge is powered by Lights Camera Help. So we have had Rich Vazquez, one of the founders and board members of LCH, Lights Camera Help, and that's available at LightsCameraHelp.org, or at NP Film. If you're interested in more information on their film festival that they provide, that happens in Texas every year. It sounds great. It sounds like you've seen a lot of amazing, impactful stories. We encourage all of you to go ahead and hop on our tweet shots, hop on our webinars, use the forums over the course of the month to get your questions answered. We do encourage you to enter the challenge in the month of February. You can enter a five-photo flicker set, or you can enter a one-minute video. That can be produced in any tool that you see fit, and you'll see the entry form on our website at www.tsdigs.org, or you can find it through TechSoup and you can find it through our friends at Lights Camera Help. Rich, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. It's been great having you here. We look forward to having time with Dave and Erin from Lights Camera Help in the following weeks. We encourage you to go ahead and RSVP for these webinars through the TSDigs website, to share it with friends, tweet it out, let other nonprofits know around the world that we welcome them to enter because we would love to see you empowered with prizes and production tools and resources to make your dreams come true. From all of us at TechSoup, this is Yvonne Hayning producing with Kyla Hunt at the TechSoup Office in San Francisco. Thank you and have a great day. And we will stop recording. And for those of you who are still here, thank you.