Northern Voice Presentation + Bongo Preview

February 23rd, 2009

Yesterday (Feb 21) Leah and I had a chance to speak at the Northern Voice 2009 Conference here in Vancouver, which seems to be avenue that sways toward the soft side of social media technology. We had a great time, and were very grateful to have the chance to share a bit about one of our current projects: Bongo. For those that couldn’t make it, I’d like to share an approximately-written version of the talk including the slides and video clip we showed.

Photo by John Biehler on Flickr

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We’re Jay Grandin and Leah Nelson. We run a company called Giant Ant Media here in Vancouver. We’re going to tell you about a trip we took to Tanzania in the fall to help a group of street youth record a hip hop album, and to make a film about it… including some lessons that we learned regarding using social media to make it happen.

Because we’re video makers, not speakers, we’re going to exercise the liberty to fast forward, rewind, jump cut, and then fade out. If we screw anything up we’ll just fix it in post.

Since this conference is all about blogging, we’ll start with a little story from our time away.

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Every day for the past five we’ve been boarding the dala dala and making the trek, crammed shoulder to shoulder [or armpit to nose, or crotch to ass, or afro to ear], to the uswailini, the ghetto, to record this hip hop album.

Each day when we walk down the dirt streets, swarms of little kids run along side us rolling tires shouting “mzungu, mzungu,” which basically means “whitey”. Dotto describes the uswailini as “houses built without a map,” which is brilliant. That’s just it.

We’ve powered through 4 tracks on the album thus far that so astoundingly exceed our expectations that we see Tanzanian Schilling signs flashing in the eyes of these street boys. They record all day, go “home” to the streets to practice and write all night, and get up to do it all over again each morning in a hot, foam-clad room that smells like a thousand armpits.

The other day it was 34 degrees outside, but at least 5 degrees hotter in the studio… and then at least 5 degrees hotter in the recording booth. After 10 minutes of filming in there my shirt is soaked right through… and the guys point and laugh.

Three days ago we were complaining over breakfast that things have gone so well that it’s going to be hard to find enough conflict for the film. Cut to: Ninja stealing the salaries of the other guys, fighting about which tracks to record, and shouting matches about botched verses.

We spoke too soon; drama now = high. A film is emerging…

That was a blog excerpt from our trip, almost exactly a year after we got together for a glass of wine in Kitisilano and said, “Do you think these guys could record an album? Do you think we could make a film about it?”

Before getting too much further, we’d like you to meet the guys. Here is a clip that we’ve put together that will give you a sense of the characters, the place, the music, and the story.

Update: An early addition of the Bongo Trailer can be viewed at BongotheFilm.com

Over the course of six weeks in Dar, we facilitated a youth-led project to record a 6-track Bongo-Flava hip hop album. We compensated a group of 20 youth with a cash salary on work days, by setting up housing for one year, and with lots and lots of cigarettes.

Now, if we rewind back one year, it’s hard to remember whether we actually thought we’d get that far, but the good news is that we all said “Yes. Of course we can.” Danya Fast, our third, had just returned from doing her MA Anthropology research in Dar es Salaam with a group of youth living and working on the streets. She told us that they were talented, we believed her, and then we collectively decided to charge forward with the project.

LESSON ONE: Say “YES!”

Over the following months after that drink, Danya started Urban Project, now a registered charity which 6 of us set up and direct, to facilitate youth led projects. The project in 2008: to record a hip-hop album in Dar es Salaam.

LESSON TWO: Tell EVERYONE what you plan to do.

As far as the charity was concerned, it was easy to envision raising money. We started out by doing what will seem obvious to most of you, but wasn’t to us at the time – We set up a facebook page and sent out hundreds of messages. We started twitter accounts and tried to build our personal brands to the point of having an audience willing to listen. We set up a WordPress-driven site and started to use the blog. We made a promo video using a compilation of photographs and blasted it out to our audiences on YouTube and MySpace. But, what happened next was that people started to talk about it, and tweet about it, and blog about it. People started asking us how they could help.

LESSON THREE: Building an audience is hard work.

So we set up chipin widgets using paypal that allowed people to donate to the project. We’d blasted so many people from all sides that when the time came for our first fundraiser, we completely sold out of tickets, and we had $1000 in online donations on top of that…. which was a lot for a $10k fundraising goal.

With $7500 raised for the charity, we got on a plane.

LESSON FOUR: Go big or go… small. Sometimes a little is a lot.

While we were there, we made a huge effort to stay in contact with all of those folks that had supported us along the way. Despite the erratic connections, we maintained 3 blogs that were written to connect with different audiences. Jay wrote a personal blog focused on humor, as he had the biggest online following, Leah maintained a film project blog to talk about the experience of making the film, and Danya maintained a charity blog that detailed the happenings from the perspective of anthropology and youth-led engagement. We were very calculated about getting a variety of photos, editing them carefully, and making them public as soon as we could in order to prove engagement to our donors, and to also show through photos that we were getting beautiful content. It was all about branding, and we spendt hours upon hours sitting in Dar’s 5 star hotel lobby uploading and updating.

LESSON FIVE: Don’t abandon your audience.

Raising money to make a film was a different story all together. It’s harder to convince people to pay for DV tapes when we were also asking for them to house these street boys and to support their art.

We started with what we knew: web content. We had sold one series to MySpace, and had turned down a second offer because it conflicted with this project. So we decided to break the film output into two pieces: a 10 part Web Series, and a feature length documentary. We met with Blip.tv, CBC, Telefilm, and Time Warner, spoke with MySpace, and even managed to get it in front of National Geographic… but no bites. No nibbles even.

LESSON SIX: You don’t know what the f@#k you’re doing… but that’s OK

What we realized was that we were talking to people that weren’t born again social media believers and, for them, our “sky’s the limit” attitude probably seemed really naive. We ran in talking about this charity we were starting to change these guys’ lives, a feature length film, a web series about our experiences, a full hip hop album…. and we were going to do it as a group of 3 people with no money and within a few months. It must have sounded nuts.

In the end, we raised enough money to support the album, pay for housing and school fees, and to provide the guys a wage for the project. We dove into our bank accounts to cover our expenses, and the film production which came to about $18k.

LESSON SEVEN: Take off your clothes.

Now, if we backed up just 18 months further, I didn’t have a home computer, a myspace or facebook account… or even a non-hotmail email address. I was designing furniture in Michigan and, as part of a research project into high technology group work, I started to set up accounts… youtube, myspace, etc. And then I started to make to make videos to make sense of the accounts.
And then people started watching them. And then we started making them together. And then more people started to watch them. And then MySpace flew me to LA to talk about producing a series for them. And then we quit our day jobs.

So just like that, our perception of connecting with an audience, and the surrounding possibilities, changed dramatically. We reached the technologically juvenile epiphany that AUDIENCE in this age is what you create, not what you pay to accost.

So, with this new personal technological pubescent growth underway, it was easy for us to say “YES” with no reservation. The previous 18 months had seen our lives change enormously – we even hitchhiked through Europe staying with strangers prompted by a MySpace bulletin to our 13,000 “friends”. So, if we could change our own lives so quickly and vastly, why couldn’t we change other people’s lives in the same way. Simple, right?

TAKE HOME LESSON: social media facilitates naive optimism.

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