Dream Job: Eyes Wide Open
Feb 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Kristinha M. Anding
One human-rights documentarian finds his way to Witness.
Sam Gregory teaches human-rights activists the basics of camera usage, editing, and effective storytelling at the Witness Video Advocacy Institute.
Sam Gregory was frustrated. As a young associate producer in the United Kingdom, he had tried his hand at making social-issue documentaries for television, but it was hard enough to get them made — much less know what impact they had once they aired. He crossed the pond to study public policy at Harvard, but he found writing policy briefs a far cry from his true goal. “What I clearly wanted to do was link the power of videos and moving-image media with real, concrete change,” he says.
Then someone told him about Witness, the New York-based video advocacy organization founded by musician Peter Gabriel in the early '90s. Gregory began volunteering at Witness after completing his master's degree, and now, seven and a half years later, he serves as the organization's program director.
Witness provides both technical and strategic video training to human-rights activists worldwide. In addition to its Core Partnership program, through which staffers work one-on-one for one to three years with organizations on specific campaigns, Witness trains 300 to 400 activists a year through its Seeding Video Advocacy workshops. The new Video Advocacy Institute is a two-week boot camp that focuses on the basics of camera usage, editing, and effective storytelling with the goal of creating an advocacy video project. Also new is The Hub, a website where activists can post videos and find an audience ready to take action for their cause.
“We've been able to circle back to some of the initial hope of Peter Gabriel: that anyone anywhere who suffered an abuse would be able to have it expressed and shared,” Gregory says. “1992 was a bit early in terms of the ability to share it, but now we have this site where both human-rights workers and concerned citizens can upload media, connect to a community that wants to listen, provide more in-depth information and context to understand the abuse, and offer ways to act.”
Witness, which uses cameras such as the Sony DSR-PDX10 and HDR-HC7 in its partnerships and trainings, has also been giving out Pure Digital Flip cameras to make it easy for activists to capture, upload, and share material on the Web.
“We're providing these Pure Digital cameras, but we're also looking ahead to the potential of cell phones,” Gregory says. “We're exploring how to provide venues for action now that almost everyone has the potential to be a witness to something. We want to make that an empowering process.”
For more information, visit www.witness.org or hub.witness.org.
