Why a great team is all you need

From Daniella Russo's moleskine.

Our support is growing and this brings great energy into the entire team. Today Passionfish joins in as a major sponsor of the festival. Other sponsors to date are Oceana, Indian Summer and the Monterey Peninsula Waste Management District. It is terrific to see so much excitement in the community for this - first - film festival in honor of Oceans Day.

A key element of the strategy for the campaign all along has been engaging non-profits and grass-roots organizations who are already working on the dangers of plastics and marine debris. Their access to the community, their "feet on the ground" are really important for the success of the campaign. We could offer excellent outreach materials, film and CDs to support their efforts. So, with these great partners on board, we march towards a great film festival. I hope we get the word out and people attend the event.

As I write about the team, it is important to mention Blaise Douros, our post-production assistant extraordinaire. In the film business post-production assistants do everything: from bringing coffee and making copies, to editing and burning CDs. Not at Sea Studios. Here we treat post-productions with some reverence, because they hold the key to our successful outreach campaigns. They produce all the material that ends in the hands of the public. Blaise came to us with a degree in music and skills in lots of technical areas. He has a great attitude, he is always ready to help, and we ask him to do everything - from producing the outreach CDs, to setting me up with a portable audio system for my keynote presentations, to researching stock footage, to selling stock footage, to creating the music for some of our podcasts, to actually getting sponsors signed up for the festival. And this is just a glimpse at his tasks. This week he did a tour de force along Cannery Row and got quite a few businesses to support he film festival.

Think Beyond Plastics keeps growing

From Daniella Russo's moleskin

It is truly amazing to see how our campaign is growing. We launched it at the end of 2008, with a Facebook cause, a viral film hosted by Edward Norton, and a destination page www.strangedayscauses.org. Our goal was to capture the interest in Edward Norton (Bring Your Own Bag), and send viewers to the portal web page that would help direct their interest. Soon we found out that there is no singular web site that organizes news, information and social activism around plastic bags, or The Garbage Patch. So we created the pages: www.droptheplasticbag.org and www.greatgarbagepatch.org. To get people to visit, we added a call to action at the end of Edward's Video Bag The Bag. We also launched a Google keyword campaign, linking certain words to the web sites. Slowly, but surely, traffic began to flow.
Today, about 14 months after we started the campaign, our Facebook cause is almost 17,000 strong and continues to grow. Traffic to both web sites is building up.
Key to our efforts now is partnering with grass-roots organizations to reach out to the communities live, not just online.
Next I will write about working with the partner organizations.

Film Festival Gains Momentum

From Daniella Russo's moleskine

Our film festival now has a logo! It is gaining momentum fast: it is listed on the web site, we have a press release and fact sheet, and are beginning to work with sponsors. Wendy is awesome. So is the Monterey Cannery Row IMAX. The theater is brand new, very elegant and with a great location. We are very happy to have them as a partner for the event.

And since I started writing about our terrific team, I have to say the event would be impossible without the talent and energy of Sheila Taylor. Sheila is our southern belle, complete with a lovely southern drawl invoking images of lazy afternoons with mint juleps in hand. But don't let this image fool you for a moment. There is nothing laid-back or slow about this woman. Behind the long blond hair and big blue eyes is one of the sharpest financial minds in the film business. Sheila is also working on the film festival, because we need all hands on deck and done a terrific job of selecting media outlets and organizing the partners. I am lucky to have such a talented team!

A film festival to honor Oceans Day

From Daniella Russo's notebook
So after long debates about how to get people interested in - er - garbage, marine debris and plastic containers, in a moment of absolutely clarity, our team of grass-roots organizations, filmmakers and non-profit leaders arrived at the decision to organize a film festival! In partnership with the Cannery Row IMAX who is providing its beautiful new facility for the event, we are now in the midst of organizing the inaugural Oceans Day film festival. This year's theme is "Think Beyond Plastics". We will screen three terrific films: Marina of the Zabballeen, Message in The Waves and Strange Days on Planet Earth (Dirty Secrets).


How do you get a film festival on a shoestring budget? Ask Wendy Goldman. Wendy is the queen of the event, who organizes us all with an iron fist and produces with a tremendous speed press releases, fact-sheets, pledges and everything else a film festival needs. Which is a lot. Click on our staff link and find out more abut Wendy. She is terrific.

Think Beyond Plastics gains momentum

From Daniella Russo's notes
Well, so much about writing regularly. We got real busy really fast: the campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of plastics "grew legs" in multiple communities and many grass-roots organizations. We have reached out to Surfrider, Save Our Shores, Oceana, Sea Life Conservation, Save The Whales and many others to get the message out to our communities. How? We produce thousands of CDs with outreach materials and ask people to take one and host a party. Not tupperware party, but a plastics-awareness party. As a result of our relentless focus on getting the word out, our Facebook cause Don't Trash The Ocean topped 15,000 and continues to snowball and traffic to our web sites GreatGarbagePatch.org and DropThePlasticBag.org has nearly doubled.
We must press on.

Daniella Russo Launches Think Beyond Plastics

The premiere of Strange Days on Planet Earth behind us, we have been focused on raising awareness of one of the topics of the film: the dangers of plastics. Our Facebook Group Stop Trashing The Ocean is growing fast, and the members have been asking how to get involved, what is going on in their communities, what efforts should they support. Traffic to both GreatGarbagePatch and DropThePlasticBag is up. Clearly, the issues of plastics are at the public's attention. So in February 2009 we launched Think Beyond Plastic, a collaborative effort to connect the online activities with community events that focus on the dangers of plastics. I went to present to a great group - Outdoor Educators at their annual gathering at the Sempervirens Outdoor School in Santa Cruz. What a great crowd! Excited, committed to the health of our planet, and willing to learn and be involved. And so much fun.
Blaise, our post-production coordinator extraordinaire got me all prepared, with my own audio, video and tons of CDs for hosting parties. It was fun!
The road ahead is long, but full of terrific bright people and I look forward to working with them on this worthy cause.

Sitka Alaska Shoot

We just returned from a week shoot in Alaska. We went up there to tell a success story about the halibut fishery. It was quite an amazing trip. The landscape and people were wonderful. I went up a few days early before our director and camera/sound crew arrived to do some scouting and to meet the fishermen/women and fish processors in person.

Prior to our arrival, we had a hard time getting fishermen and fisherwomen to commit to interviews and fishing trips over the phone. So I hit the ground running. My job was to find as many halibut fishers as possible. But I also needed to find someone to take us out on a boat so we could film halibut fishing. This was not so easy. It was salmon season, and the majority of boats were focusing on salmon. Plus the weather looked like it was going to get really bad by the time the crew arrived. So I lucked out and found a boat called the Kathleen Jo heading out for a two-day halibut trip. I did some fast-talking, and within an hour I was on board heading out to sea with two kind fishermen.
I had brought my HDV video camera and a tripod. I am not sure why I bothered to bring the tripod. It was completely useless on a boat. I ended up getting some nice footage of the fishermen setting three sets of long-line gear. I got a little nauseous, but managed to keep all my cookies to myself. It’s hard to keep your balance, look through a viewfinder, and not get seasick. By the second day I had my sea legs and filmed the fishermen catching halibut without feeling like I might need to find the leeward side of the boat. They only caught about 30 halibut, but that was plenty for me to film. They said it was the worst catch they had ever had. But 30 halibut ended up being over 600 pounds. They caught twice the pounds of yelloweye. It’s a kind of orange rockfish. The fishermen said yelloweye is actually tastier than halibut.


By the middle of the second day, the weather report was calling for gale force winds, so we headed back to Sitka. The director, Rob Whittlesey and the cameraman, Harry Dawson, met me at the dock. Later we met up with our sound mixer, Phillip Powell and went out for the first of many fabulous seafood meals.

The next day we went to a fish processor and filmed several boats offloading their halibut catches.

Since the weather turned bad, it had chased all the fishing boats back to port. So we had lots to film. And what’s more, the weather was going to stay bad, which meant we were able to interview the fishermen/women of Sitka. If the sun had come out, we would have been out of luck.

All in all, the shoot went very smooth and we got the footage we hoped for! Click HERE to see all the photos from the shoot.