COPYFRIGHT! Get Off Your Arse and Read This Article!

Posted: 27th Oct 2010
Category: Articles
Tags: Emily James, Just Do It: Get off Your Arse and Change the World, the luckiest nut in the world, creative commons, crowd funding, Lush

Just Do It: Get off Your Arse and Change the World! is the upcoming film directed by award winning filmmaker Emily James (The Luckiest Nut in the World). The documentary follows key activists in the Climate Camp, Climate Rush and Plane Stupid organisations as they prepare to take to the streets. No stranger to political activism, James has directed a number of critically acclaimed series for broadcast that expose mis-goings on in the global market. But how does this new project, sourced solely from Crowd Funding and licenced under Creative Commons, fare in comparison? Laura Thornley at DFG talks to the director about the legal issues of working with direct activists, evading the authorities and fundraising the hard way.

Can you tell me a little about why you chose the Crowd funding process?

When we decided to make the film independently that meant that there were only a few options for funding available. Crowd funding seemed to be the most obvious direction for us to go because we had a film that we figured would have a reasonably large grass roots support. So… choosing to release the film [under] Creative Commons [licence] essentially made it in keeping with the principles of the groups we were working with. Of course that meant that by releasing it as a Creative Commons project we couldn’t expect to have very much income so we needed to find a different way of funding it, so crowd funding was a relatively easy choice in that regard.

How have you supported yourself throughout the project? Do you receive salaries? And if you do, how do you make this transparent when you are receiving public donations?

Yeah there are two of us on the film that receive salaries. We’ve predominately up until now [taken small salaries]. But in terms of transparency, we are very transparent and if anyone wants to know exactly where the money goes we are very open to showing people our books and our budget. The point is that we have a big funding gap. We have a budget that is a kind of notional accounting of where we would spend money if we had it and we have our actual cash flow budget, which is significantly smaller. But the aim is to raise it eventually. But we would very happily show those to people who were genuinely interested.

Have you found people to be receptive to this way of fundraising for a film?

It’s interesting because I think that one of the things we have noticed quite a lot is that people are very much accustomed to the idea that we are going to make something and we are going to sell it to them. When you say to people we are going to give this all away for free to everybody but we would really like you to make a small donation now to enable us to do that, [the response is] like, out of my pocket? You want my money? We are asking [people] to do something that is quite outside their normal experience and something that feels quite unusual.

But interestingly enough having this Lush match period has just been amazing at increasing donations. Three months after we launched crowd funding on our site we had less then £6000 [but] in the first week with Lush we had nearly £4000 in donations. It really bore out a lot of the advice we had gotten to be true about things like people need a reason to give now. I think it has helped a lot in terms of people… who had meant to make a donation but hadn’t got round to it yet. I’m a little bit worried about what’s going to happen when the match fund period stops and all the donations completely dry up. We are going to have to come up with a real, clever inventive scheme to get the money out of people’s pockets.

Can you tell me about the legal issues that you have faced working with activists, filming activists and the police?

When I first started talking to various activists about the idea of filming the lead up to the practicing of action, they absolutely, resoundingly said, “no way”. It took me quite a long time talking to legal firms that represent activists and asking a lot of questions about what the real risks would be. I came up with … a working practice that people could trust in. The key parts of it I worked out in the discussions with the lawyers; if the authorities didn’t know the material existed… then that eliminated the vast majority of the risk. So I had to be very careful. All of the tapes were stored at a safe house, the address of which no one but myself knew and I kept no logs or written reference of what I had shot. The labeling on the tapes was encrypted so if you came across it by accident then you wouldn’t know what it was. All of these things made post-production so fun! but so far we have not lost anything. [The second assurance came because] I knew that it was going to be a long project before we got to the end. So I was able to say to the activists that none of the material of the planning or preparation would be released until their court cases were closed on that particular action. For example, one of the actions that I focus on in the film was Black Heath Camp at the RBS headquarters last year. The final court cases have only just finished three weeks ago for that, so the time scale can be quite massive. Then the other side of it is that I specifically didn’t get people to sign a release form. Your typical release form has you sign away pretty much any say you have about how that film is used. But in this case… I felt like it was only respectful that I give [the activists] quite a lot of power in the situation.

Is this tied into why you choose the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Creative Commons licence?

For me the Creative Commons experience… really should include not just the ability to watch it for free or share it with other people but to re-hash it, to re-incorporate it into other things. But I made this promise to people that appear in the footage, that they could have a say on when images of them were used. So that’s certainly a concern but I don’t think it’s a major concern. If we finish it and if we have the capacity, we will probably put out some chunks of the film, which we are very happy for people to reuse. At the moment we haven’t even figured out how we are going to pay for the servers so people can go on and download the actual film!

Can you explain why you chose the title you did? Have you experienced any legal problems with Nike?

One of the things that really appealed to me about Just Do It was that we were being a little bit cheeky and also making a political statement. Companies like Nike trademark phrases from the English language and then by doing so monopolize them so other people can’t use them. You will notice that we don’t subvert the logo from Nike or anything like that because if we were to we would be crossing the line legally. Which would [make it] very easy for them to say you are undermining our brand. It was a phrase that existed before them… it’s kind of an act of re-appropriation.

Are there any decisions you’ve made along the way that you would change?

I think I am not one for regrets because I always think you make choices and then you just get on with it. But maybe here’s one: in February we had decided we were going to go for crowd funding so we were looking at ways to go about it. We [could] either go on a platform like [Indigogo or Kickstarter] or we could build the capacity into our website to collect the donations and kind of have it in a DIY manner on our site. We decided on [our website] for a number of reasons. Partially because things like Kickstarter and Indigogo take between 4 and 5% of your donations. So that was a deterrent. They are also in Dollars, which would be odd for our audience. Also… we felt like it would be better if we could do it on our own site rather than push a lot of traffic to this reasonably established platform, where we don’t know where the money goes. At the time in February we thought it would take 3 or 4 weeks for the website to be up and working, instead it took 3 or 4 months. It was quite an agonizing process. It was very difficult for us to get our site to function quite as well as those sites. Something like Indigogo I’m sure has vast quantities of money put into it to development and so when you donate to something it’s very good at offering you lots of sharing tools afterwards, e.g Facebook group, or email to a friend, which proved very difficult to replicate on our own site. I still believe for this particular project we made the right choice but I think for other projects there is no reason why people should not go onto one of these platforms.

Just Do It: Get off Your Arse and Change the World! is funding completely through the Crowd Funding process. It is set for release in spring 2011. To find out more about the project and to make a donation check out their website.

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