Arts and Culture (10)
By Katherine Dodds On November 09, 2013 | 0 Comments
It's time for our annual foray into the lovely world of collaborators and allies at Media Democracy Days! 
We'll be tabling to promote all our projects, and of course the long-awaited new release of Picturing Transformation Nexw-áyantsut, the book I co-wrote with Chief Bill Williams and Nancy Bleck. Check it out at www.PicturingTransformation.com. Please join us on November 21 at Emily Carr Universtity for a Traditional Coast Salish Utsám' Witness Ceremony to officially launch the book! info on our launches page.
David Ng and I will be joined at our table by Duane Stewart-Grant, one of the first youth we worked with for the Star in Your Own Stories workshops with Chee Mamuk. You can see the video he helped make with his community at Kitamaat Village at www.YouthHaveThePower.com!
Katherine Dodds AKA "Kat" is the founder of Good Company Communications and HelloCoolWorld.com. Trained in renegade advertising & branding through her work with Adbusters in the '90s, Kat's early induction into the possibilities of the web-world was inspired by the term hypertext, which she immediately found comforting. She is dedicated to cause-related communication and to the development and use of tools that promote democratic processes.
|
By Colette On April 22, 2013 | 0 Comments
Help us reach our goal of 5000 boosts by midnight April 25!
Hello Cool World is excited to be working on the media relations for Occupy Love, an inspiring new documentary from award-winning Canadian filmmaker Velcrow Ripper (Scared Sacred, Fierce Light). Occupy Love explores the cultural uprisings of our time from the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring to the European Summer and environmental protests and asks the question, “How could the crisis we are facing become a love story?”.
Check out the trailer HERE.
Occupy Love is being self-distributed by a talented team led by Velcrow and producers Nova Ami and Ian Mackenzie. Their crowd sourced, social media driven approach to distribution is consistent with the theme of the film, which successfully raised $80,000 through the crowd-funding platforms IndieGoGo and Kickstarter!
The global response to the film has been amazing with over 200 grassroots screenings being self-organized by individuals and organizations in over 25 countries, and more being added every day. The largest community screening so far took place in Porto Allegre, Brazil on April 11th attracting a whopping 1,500 attendees!
We look forward to watching the momentum grow!
Occupy Love marks the completion of Velcrow's Fierce Love Trilogy, a twelve-year journey which began with Scared Sacred, named one of Canada’s Top 10 movies of 2004, and winner of the 2005 Genie (Canadian Academy Award) for best feature documentary. It continued with 2008′s award winning Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action. (We've got a special to buy both these DVDs on our webstore for 40% off.)
We worked on outreach and DVD production for Scared Sacred. As with our work with The Corporation, and The Take, we've been inspired by how films with a social message, can find audiences and inspire those audiences to action. All these films are available on our webstore, and all our profits go to our campaigns, and now also to the distribution platform for social cause media we are developing. Check out our proposal to CFC's IdeaBOOST program, and please BOOST us, our dream is to better help films like Occupy Love engage with audiences, and to encourage audiences to organize actions as well as screenings.
Occupy Love is a moving, transformative, heartfelt film, featuring Ripper’s signature stunning visuals and rich soundscapes along with interviews from leading visionaries including Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Jeremy Rifkin, bell hooks and Charles Eisenstein.
The Occupy Love US theatrical tour starts Friday, May 3, 2013 in New York City, with screenings and special events to follow in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Seattle.
Coming to Canadian theatres starting June 2013! Check out more screenings and opportunities to get involved after the page break...
Tag(s):
Aboriginal,
Activism & Protests,
Adbusters,
Alternative Economics,
Arts and Culture,
Blogging,
Climate Change,
Distribution,
Environment,
Film Launch,
First Nations,
Hello Cool World,
Local Events and Parties,
Middle East,
Naomi Klein,
Occupy Movement,
Poverty and Economic Justice,
Social Justice,
The Corporation
|
Colette joined Hello Cool World team back in 2003 and was a key organizer for The Corporation and The Take's grassroots outreach efforts across North America. After being inspired by the organizing and awareness building potential of the internet and social issue films, she returned to school to study Communications and sharpen her skills. Once graduating, Colette returned to Hello Cool World once again as a grassroots campaign consultant. She is now the Director of Distribution for Hello Cool World's new fair trade distribution arm.
|
By Katherine Dodds On April 05, 2013 | 0 Comments
At Hello Cool World we really are dreamers, and it's a good thing too. We dream of tools for social change, amplification engines for all our visions of alternative futures. The dream is what keeps me going.
There is a story behind every dream. Since I learned to read (such a long time ago), the technology that is the alphabet changed my life forever. But I also had the first massive moment of facing my limits because I had always assumed that once a person learned to read, they simply went on to read all the books. Which is what I set out to do.
The moment when I realized I could never read all the books was devastating. I also discovered there were more languages than I could ever learn. The tower of babble fell on my five-year old self, already drunk on fermented knowledge apples. It was one of my most profound moments, the friction between desire and reality, and I never recovered from learning my personal limits.
Since then I have been obsessed with systems. And collaborations. Things that help people do more than what they can do alone. And which is why, in such a personal way, I fell in love with the possiblities of the internet.
When we began working on The Corporation over a decade ago, our dream was to mobilize a grassroots network that connects audiences to ideas and actions. I remember excited conversations with Mark Achbar, before the film was even in production, about grassroots outreach and the possiblities of email. We were excited about websites and heady over hypertext. It was a time when blogs barely existed, and Facebook and Twitter were years away.
But the people and projects behind the technology were the point all along. What I fell in love with was the power of connecting people. We had a grassroots hit on our hands armed with little more than an email list. As we foraged forward, we built the technological infrastructure to go with it, a centralized platform to create and launch campaigns. We always liked to say that our platform balanced content, technology and outreach.
And I could not have done ANY of this alone. Films take teams of people. So do websites, databases and strategies. What we built in the early days (with the strategic advice of Scott Nelson and the hands-on help of Phillip Djwa, followed by David Griffith, and more recently with Atef Abdelkefi & Sandy Haksi), has been serving us well.
But now, we at Hello Cool World are up against the limits of our old code, and in the face of new frontiers it's time to BOOST our platform to new heights. In a way that will offer the economy of scale to our potential user and investors.
This platform connects all the work we have been doing. We are putting into practice everything we have learned before, during and after the launches of The Corporation and other documentaries The Take, Scared Sacred, and 65_RedRoses, as well as from book projects like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and Picturing Transformation, Nexw-áyantsut, the book I am co-writing (with Chief Bill Williams and Nancy Bleck) for the Uts'am Witness Project. We're drawing on our experience with LACE Campaign, promoting cervical cancer awareness, and our many sexual health campaigns and cross-cultural projects, all of which require mobilizing and connecting people around a cause. We're proud of what we've accomplished and if we can scale it up, we believe we can do more good for more people.
Make our dreams come true, not only for us, but for you.
By Katherine Dodds On December 18, 2012 | 0 Comments
NOW EVEN BIGGER BARGAINS for items from our online store, + NEW products! 
REMEMBER TODAY IS THE LAST DAY to order in time for Xmas if you choose express delivery options!
Use the promo code PopUpShop2012 at the checkout for 10% off EVERYTHING on our online store, and since we've also put 5% off our ENTIRE inventory, you save 15%.
Even greater savings for 65_RedRoses fans, 25% off with promo code #4EvaHeart (only works on 65_RedRoses items).
Looking for a SPICY stocking stuffer? Or a scathing critique of the 'orgasm product industry'?
Do gooders like to have fun too! Maybe you are looking for something a little more fun for someone you love? We have organic all natural body candy, lube and oils from Good Clean Love + Liz Canner's entertaining documentary expose of the search for the female viagra.
If you are in Vancouver and order online, our Chinatown warehouse (525 Carrall) will be open for a few hours on Saturday Dec 22 for pick up if you want to choose to save on shipping! Call 604 251 5567 for times.
Besides the well known Corporation and 65_RedRoses products, we have some great new titles just in, some of them brand new films. Read below the line for details on new items!
Thank you for supporting our campaigns!
By Michelle Reid On March 05, 2012 | 2 Comments
The OWN Documentary Club premiere of 65_RedRoses is just ahead in May, and community screenings are being organized around Canada, so it's on our minds lately: what kind of impact will we see after the film airs? Eva's hope, and ours too, is that people will be inspired to take the simple step of registering as organ donors, and supporting cystic fibrosis research.
Serendipitously, while we were thinking about this question, an article was posted that answered it exactly! "Will Food Inc. Actually Change Your Life?" is from a study that asked what impact movies have on behaviour. Researchers found that people who see a documentary film, compared to people with similar values who don't see the film, are actually likely to take action and make changes!
The Norman Lear Research Centre conducted a study on Food Inc, by analyzing the shared traits and values of a Food inc audience against people with similar traits & values who hadn't seen the film. In other words, two groups of almost identical people differentiated by whether or not they had watched Food Inc. The group that had seen Food Inc had changed their food buying and shopping behaviour- just as the filmmakers intended!
This isn't too surprising to us- at Hello Cool World, we've been building campaigns that use effective storytelling to promote healthy behaviours for a long time. Other recent research, such as this article on storytelling and statistics, supports the theory that information conveyed through first-person stories and narratives is much more powerful than just information alone.
That's why Eva's story is so incredible. Not only was she a wonderful person, but through her experience the audience sees firsthand why organ donor registration is so important, and it motivates them to take action! This is supported by a post BC Transplant made on their Facebook Page a few days ago: organ donor registrations in Canada tripled after the broadcast of the original version of 65_RedRoses. We can't wait to see the impact of the new version when it reaches even more people!
Michelle is a freelance writer and anthropologist with a Master of Public Health from UBC. Her passions are promoting health and building community. She's worked in grassroots community organizations in Vancouver, Victoria and Oceania.
|
<<First
<Prev
1
2
Next>
Last>>
