For a while, I’ve alluded to a documentary project I’ve been pursuing. The time is finally right for me to tell you a little bit more about it.
At the end of last year, I formed a production company with two other partners to create a film tackling the topic of political correctness on college campuses. There are many great books that discuss political correctness, but to our knowledge, nobody has ever produced a film on the subject.
While our ultimate goal is to produce a feature-length documentary for release in 2005, a more immediate goal was to produce a short documentary and release it at the beginning of the 2004/2005 school year. That’s where we are now, and I’m proud to announce that our project—a 46-minute film entitled Brainwashing 101—will be screened publicly for the first time at a film festival in Dallas this Saturday, September 11th. (I will be there, as will my two partners in the production company.) We are also making the film immediately available online. More about that below.
Why are we releasing a short film now? Well, we’re obviously interested in finding mainstream distribution for our final film, the one that will be released next year. Knowing the political proclivities of the film business, we expect that finding distribution might take us a little more time than it does for left-of-center documentarians. So, there’s no time like now to get started making connections.
But we’re also trying to do something that might prove a lot more interesting: we’re making the first documentary where the Internet will play a pivotal role in helping create the film.
We’ll be using the Internet to organize a distributed network of digital video gatherers—what we’re referring to as our DV Squad—to cover territory that our small crew can’t. We hope to have DV Squad members at schools around the country, ready to document the political environments on their respective campuses. The most compelling of the submissions from our DV Squad members could end up in our final film. Because we’re capitalists and we believe that good work should be rewarded, we’re holding a contest for the best DV Squad footage. The top three winners will take home an Apple Macintosh iBook G4, an Apple iPod, and an iPod Mini, respectively.
We’re also using the Internet to distribute Brainwashing 101. Anyone familiar with this site knows that online video distribution is nothing new, but our 46-minute film is quite a bit longer than your typical online video. We’re really pushing the technological limits of the Internet. Can the current infrastructure provide independent filmmakers with a viable medium for widely distributing their long-form work? We don’t know; as far as we’re aware, it hasn’t been really tried this way before. Will people tolerate watching a long video in a small window? We will soon find out. (We are also making DVDs available for people who want to watch a high-quality version of the film at home.)
Want to see for yourself? Visit our new website AcademicBias.com. From there, you’ll be able to watch Brainwashing 101, download it, buy it on DVD, join the DV Squad and learn more about political correctness. We’re trying to build a website comprehensive enough to serve as a web portal for information on campus political correctness. We’re not out to replace the good websites that are already out there, but to augment them by providing users with a one-stop location for finding relevant resources elsewhere on the web.
People often stub their toes while breaking new ground. It remains to be seen whether our online experiment will work. With your help, it will. And if it does, it’ll represent another leap forward for online media.
