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| From Fledgling |
Hello fellow travelers on the filmmaking/social media super highway!
Sending out some Valentine's Day love, and I wanted to highlight something great that happened today, that took some Internet & twitter magic to come to fruition.
Since its launch, our team has been watching MTV's "A Thin Line," a campaign, dedicated to raising awareness of "Digital Abuse," and helping teens untangle normal versus unhealthy relationship dynamics. They focus on how cell phones can amplify and exacerbate abusive behaviors. Some of my favorite slogans are: It's a thin line between attentive/obsessive, curious/controlling, love/abuse. I was thinking that we over here at The Line Campaign, have a lot of things in common such as: young people, sexuality, violence, web-based media, and activism.
I initiated a twitter back and forth about Beyonce's "Video Phone" video (*ugh*) and then I asked our fab intern Ingrid to do some research and write a post about their campaign. It was a couple weeks before February, Teen Dating Violence Awareness month, so we took a look at Katie Couric's piece on the topic, too. Ingrid spent a lot of time on both initiatives, picking apart what was authentic, realistic, what felt scripted, what related to her demographic, and what fell flat. She posted Corporation: FAIL! Teens, Sex & Violence. I tweeted to @a_thin_line that they were featured on the blog and -Internet magic!- they responded. The takeaway here is your voice does matter.
MTV then invited us to a meeting at Viacom HQ to discuss their work and hear our feedback. Obviously, I let 18 year old Ingrid do the talking, her comments ranged from the show "16 & Pregnant" not showing struggles of lower income or homeless girls, "Jersey Shore" which entertains us with violence in every episode, and the PSA's for "A Thin Line" not showing real kids going through the issues. I mediated, waxing the benefits of reaching a wide audience, raising awareness, and the reality of working within a Corporate Social Responsibility framework.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, me and the home team shot and edited a short video using candy and some of our favorite responses to "where is your line?" Our hope was that with the video would go viral on Valentine's Day and drive more traffic to the site and generate interest in the film and campaign. Ingrid followed up our meeting at MTV with an email and a link to our video "ASK ME" -- and today they posted it!
What's really exciting is that we developed The Line Campaign with support from The Fledgling Fund in June, and only went live in September 2009. The trailer for THE LINE has been on Vimeo for less than a year, and already has over 12,000 views. We are learning as we go, and the results have been really interesting.
Where will it lead next? A broadcast on MTV or streaming broadcast on MTV.com? We sure hope so!
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