From A.man.i at My Urban Report comes word of a campaign to get point-and-shoot video cameras into the hands of the people of Burma to try and overcome the tight controls the country’s junta has put on the flow of information. The appeal comes from a group called Stonecircles:
There is a dire need to get video equipment and transmission equipment back into the country and into the hands of democracy activists so that the world can once again bring its attention to the needs of the people of Burma.
We are now in the process of purchasing a large number of “flip video” cameras which are very discrete, AA battery operated, tape-less cameras who data can be uploaded directly to a computer and then sent by satellite phone out to the world.
The cameras are only about $100 a piece and we need your help to purchase them and the more expensive transmission equipment needed to get the video out of the country.
The vidcam they refer to is a point-and-shoot that writes up to an hour of MPEG-4 AVI video to internal Flash memory and has a flip-out USB connector, so it can be plugged directly into a computer for uploading. News video “pros” pretty much scoff at these things, but they may be right for places such as Burma: they are relatively inconspicuous, AA battery operated and cheap enough that you could flood an area with them.
I don’t know much about stonecicrcles beyond what’s at their webste, but this is a cause you might want to support. And this is an idea — putting low-cost, effective storytelling tools into the hands of those immersed in the story — that big media might want to keep in mind for getting deeper into stories that are difficult to tell.
TAGS: BURMA, STONECIRCLES, VIDEO JOURNALISM, CITIZEN JOURNALISM
[...] group is raising money to try to send small video cameras to the activists in Burma so they can do citizen reports on their situation. I like the idea. If journalists just can’t [...]