Literally days after launching The Walk a Mile Project website and running our first Press Release, we received a call with a free Public Service Announcement offer to help get the word out. The spot will run outside Lambeau Field for the final four Green Bay Packers games — at the NFL’s largest tailgating experience. With a reach of around 750,000 people over the next several weeks, and right in America’s heartland no less, it’s a pretty exciting start. There will also bea small crew walking around asking a few questions for us, different questions each week, to help us get a feel for the general perception on the GMO situation, at least among the passionate football fans in Wisconsin! I’m looking forward to seeing the results.
Now a big part of The Walk a Mile Project isn’t just the perspective we seek by walking a mile in another person’s shoes, it’s also letting all of you into the project itself, so you can see what we’re doing, the steps we take, the hard work involved, etc. Your engagement is what will make this into a truly great media presence for the long term, as working together brings a strength you can’t just find anywhere. It’s our jobs to make sure you’re with us every step of the way, so let me give you a glimpse into the “Hey we need a 30-second PSA ASAP” chaos that hit in the last week or so!
First off, check out the spot itself up above, if you haven’t already. It’s just a quick 30-second intro for the project and Change The World Films, but when you get the call to create a 30-second spot out of the blue while you’re in the middle of finishing off a website launch, well… that’s indie filmmaking fun right there — especially when we don’t start shooting the main part of the project until early 2015!! But you’ve got to roll with the punches, and getting the chance to put something out in front of hundreds of thousands of people right out the gate, well yeah — we’ll take that!
The spot itself really just focuses on the big GMO question, and the fact that we’re here to find answers — to truly get to the bottom of this situation that’s been gradually approaching its boiling point for nearly two decades now, with no real resolution. 30 seconds is such a small time frame for communicating at any depth, however, and we really needed to get the other point across — that this is essentially a COMMUNITY PROJECT.
YOU make it work, YOU help us reach the finish line. Change The World Films tagline is “Discover the truth and change the world,” but the word together fits right on the end there, because that’s what this all about. All of us discovering the truth and changing the world together.
So what exactly did this quick spot entail when there was no time to pull anyone else in to help throw it together? Not to go all Guster up in here, but I guess it took my attempt at being a one man wrecking machine. Write it, record the voice-over, then mix/master it with the music, create the effects and then pull in the footage from our early preview trailer and edit it all together — that’s the anatomy of the PSA you see above, all in less than 2 days. Now for the project itself, you’ll see many different pieces, with many people involved from start to finish… but right out of the gate here, despite the unexpected distraction, I must admit that wearing all those hats again (like I did during parts of PYRITE, one of our movies about racism over at Hollywood 27) felt pretty invigorating.
That said, we’re up-and-running full throttle at the very start of 2015, with people better at throwing 30-second spots together than I am in the mix, so there are much bigger and better things to come. I’m really, really excited about what we’re about to accomplish here. I hope you will be too!
