How To Do Animal Rights. Activities for Animal Rights: Video Activist

How to Do Animal Rights - & Win the War on Animals

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Chapter Sections

1. Undercover Investigator

2. Video Activist

3. Animal Friendly Traveller

4. Preacher

5. Animal Rescuer

6. Investigative Reporter

7. Media Watcher

8. Philosopher

9. Flyer

10. Personal Activist

11. Animal Lawyer

12. Politician

13. Prisoner Supporter

14. Public & School Speaker

15. Aerial Snooper

16. Scientific Investigator

17. Solo Information Worker

18. Street Theatre Actor

19. Teacher

20. Voluntary Worker Abroad

How to Do Animal Rights - and Win the War on Animals

Chapter 4

Activities for Animal Rights

2. Video Activist

"All that you need to become a true video activist is the necessary equipment, practice to develop your required skills, and, perhaps most importantly, inspiration." Thomas Harding (1)

The miniaturisation and affordability of video technology has brought onto the streets the video activist or videographer. Images and sound bites have the power to seize people's attention and bring home the reality of what is happening around them. Video activists wield the video camera to defend and promote civil rights. You can harness the power of the video camera to bear witness for animal rights. Freelance or work for animal voluntary organisations on their campaigns. Video the odd demonstration or work on a long-term project setting objectives and targeting specific audiences. Set yourself up as a lone video activist or gather a team together. When sufficiently experienced you could train others to be video activists too.

Personal Qualities You Will Need

As a video activist you should or will have to:

Learn the skills of taking and making a good video. You do not need to be a film producer or photo journalist to be successful.
Not mind obtruding on people, asking them probing questions and poking your camera into their faces.
Be confident and courageous when approaching rowdy or aggressive people in hectic situations where you might get hurt physically or when approaching despairing people in desperate conditions where you might get hurt emotionally.
Feel comfortable ears muffled with headphones, staring through your camera, separate, even alienated, from everyone around you when the action gets hot.
Be able to stick to your role as video activist should an animal or anyone get beaten or trampled. You will miss getting those video shots if you dilute your task with distractions; you must let others do the aiding.
Be willing to cope with tedium and frustration. Your mere presence does not guarantee that interesting incidents will materialise and you will spend days in the field when nothing of note happens. You have to hang around a lot.

What to Video?

Two basic video activisms for animal rights videographers are recording campaign videos and witness videos.

Campaign videos

You document events and conditions where animals are mistreated, neglected or abused. Your aim is to raise people's awareness, educate and exhort people to act, and persuade people to donate money to fight abuse.

Witness videos

You record at animal rights demonstrations. Your purpose is to capture evidence of illegal or vicious activity on activist demonstrators by the opposition or police as evidence in court. Taking shots of demonstrations can also be an important part of making a campaign video.

The Campaign Video

You will want to tell a story through video. So where do you find stories? You can easily access some places, like circuses, rodeos and zoos. Factory farms are a bit more difficult and you will have to use your ingenuity to video them, and laboratories and research institutions may be guarded and alert (but see the Chapter 4, Undercover Investigator under the section Surveillance Systems).

Video activists are not in the league of making three-hour documentary films. Depending on your purpose, a five to ten minute video can be long enough, certainly for the Web or to screen at a debate. Your object is not to bore your viewers but to carry across what you want to say and your video should be just long enough for that. It is said that one picture is worth a thousand words; certainly, one timely five minute video is worth a three hour film. Examples of campaign videos are:

A Circus Video

Circus Suffering is a video produced by the Captive Animals Protection Society that juxtaposes circus animals a hundred years ago with circus animals today. The video carries the message that we have advanced tremendously in our understanding of wildlife yet 'wild' circus animals still live in shackles. The video was shot at circuses across Europe, features elephants, baboons, ponies, lions, bears and tigers, and, says CAPS, captures "the confinement, deprivation and violence in these animals' lives." A television presenter narrates the twelve minute video, which also has a five minute Web version.

A Foie Gras Video

The San Diego City Council was deciding on a proposed law in 2006 to ban the sale of foie gras. The California based Animal Protection & Rescue League presented the Council with a 15 minute video as testimony, made in association with two other animal rights bodies. The Council passed the ban almost unanimously.

A Rescue Video

Go out on an animal rescue (see the Animal Rescuer, this chapter). Video the team posing together and show them setting out and arriving at their destination (include a shot of a map). Get wide angle views of the target premises and then close ups of team members getting inside. Show the conditions of the place and the state the animals are in. Also show the animals post-rescue being cleaned up at your base and recovering with adoption volunteers. To get the full story on an open rescue you will want to video yourselves being arrested and tried, people's reactions, even yourself in prison. Add narration, and music if you like.

When making a campaign video, camera work should be only one of your talents. Planning the video is the most important skill and may take up eighty percent of video production and most of your energy. Professional film makers plan their films with storyboards, drawing sequences of pictures that will make up the complete movie. Storyboarding makes a video a lot easier to direct and edit and you could do it like that. Or you could sit down, close your eyes and concentrate hard on visualising what your video will be about, shot for shot, searching for potential problems and thinking through how you will overcome them. Then, having sorted that out, make a list of the shots. Finally go out and shoot them.

The Witness Video

Record events at animal rights demonstrations. In particular catch problems involving the police and opposition against the demonstrators. By videoing at demonstrations:

You prevent or restrain by your mere presence any over-reactions and excesses by the police acting heavily against demonstrators or being idle when they should be attentive and competent. Police are accountable and do not want to be caught out on video for the world to see.
You forestall opposition violence when they see they are being videoed. But keep an eye open for anyone wanting to 'taking you out', hopefully a rare occurrence!.
You offer video footage to lawyers as evidence in litigation disputes to acquit activists and bystanders of spurious or inflated police charges.
You may capture confrontational fracas to distribute to the news media for publicity in favour of animal rights.

What you do not want to do is inadvertently record illegal activity that could get animal rights people into trouble. This might happen should your footage be shown publicly and wrongly interpreted or the police confiscate your camera and use your footage for their purposes. Do not think that the police will not seize your video camera, even if their taking it is illegal, as they can always make up an excuse afterwards. If the police think you are taking part in the demonstration, rather than being an uninvolved reporter, they might decide to arrest you on some trumped up charge, such as trespassing on private property or riotous behaviour. To counter this it may be prudent to shoot footage of both sides' altercations so that you can claim to be unbiased. You may also want something that identifies you as an impartial journalist or a member of some part of the news media. Ideally you would flaunt an official press card. Failing that you could devise a business card ('Joe Snappitall - Freelance Photojournalist - Times Square.'), or have in your pocket a letter from a video company stating that you are on assignment for them.

While shooting your witness video speak a calm, objective, running commentary into the video camera's microphone. Start with the time, date and place and at appropriate moments re-state the time and position where you are shooting. Note the identity numbers of individual police antagonists, the identities of anyone they arrest, and the name and contact data of witnesses. Follow up possible opportunities for more shots; find out where arrested or injured people were taken and check other video activists working close by to swop footage.

When the fur is really flying at a demonstration it is helpful to have one or more helpers. They can assist you by looking out for good potential shots, protecting you by watching your rear, and sneaking your video footage out of the area if the police are intend on grabbing it. You might be more effective at demonstrations as part of a team of video activists, each member taking their own footage to make a more complete record of what is happening. Some team members could shoot close up, others from a distance, or take footage from opposite sides of an incident.

Interviewing demonstrators can be enjoyable and interesting. Ask open ended questions, like 'what did you see?' or 'what did you do?' Whenever they stop speaking just prompt them by repeating 'then what happened?' Ask again if what they say is not clear, they must speak credibly. Elbow your way into someone else's witness interview; your job is to get evidence, not to be polite. Get phone numbers or addresses from good witnesses, but expect that they may not want to get involved.

Depending on circumstances you may want to shoot openly or from cover. People are sometimes shy, so you could act as though your camera is turned off and carry it inconspicuously while still shooting, or only use its microphone. Get a shoulder bag for a lot of covert shooting. Cut a hole for the camera lens at one end of the bag and tape the camera in position making sure you can see the camera's viewfinder with the bag open. Cut another hole for your microphone or clip the mic to your clothes.

You may want to buy a pinhole video camera if your heart is set on covert work (Surveillance Systems, in Undercover Investigator, this chapter). These cameras sit on a dime yet zoom, tilt and pan like their bigger relatives. However, while the camera itself is not too expensive, you will have to buy a tiny recorder to store the images the camera takes and that could cost several times the camera's price tag. You will also need to buy other bits like cables, batteries and battery power adapters.

Basic Video Field Kit

Apart from access to a computer and editing software, you do not need much else than the basic field kit. The basic field kit of the modern video activist consists of:

Camera: often a camcorder (a camera with a built-in recording device) that plays back footage and sound.
Batteries: they will probably come with the camera, but get a long-life battery as a spare.
Battery charger: it will probably come with the camera.
Headphones: to monitor your sound recording. Buy them as an extra.
Kit bag: for carrying your kit conveniently and safely. Buy it as an extra.

Video cameras are digital and video technology is a growing and fast-changing industry. Some video cameras record for several hours without needing attention, so you can keep recording without constantly downloading footage to a computer or changing batteries. Almost any brand of video camera (or camcorder) will do. But you may like it to have a good range of manual functions so that you can control it by hand for what you want it to do - instead of it choosing automatically and overriding you.

You will also want to consider what the video camera will record its images and sound on. A video camera can record on tape (getting outdated), DVD or hard drive. DVD's are small disks you slot into the camcorder and you can record over them repeatedly. The newest technology is a hard drive (like a computer's) built-in to the camera. It accepts several hours of recording and is easily transferable to your computer via a memory stick or other device.

Tips For Making Videos

Buy a cheap video camera if your equipment might get smashed, eg at a violent demo. But buy quality equipment if you intend your video for television or other public viewing.

Perch your video camera on a monopod or tripod to prevent it (and the footage) shaking. Otherwise, if you do not want impediments in fast moving demonstration, brace yourself against something, like a lamppost or a helper's shoulder.

Get ten seconds or more on each of the important shots.

Be sparing when panning and zooming. Do not continually move the camera back the way it came. Your viewers will not want to be motion-sick. Pan slowly and steadily from one scene or subject to another.

Your video camera is also a tape recorder. It will record sounds closer to it better than sounds further away. Experiment with an external microphone you can point at sound sources and filters out peripheral sounds.

Monitor with headphones while recording to make sure the sound is not a jumble of static.

Check that you really are recording. You may have been recording when you thought you had stopped and stopped recording when you thought you started.

Monitor what is going on while shooting. Keep both eyes open, one looking through the viewfinder and the other checking your surroundings.

Learn to shoot while walking backwards.

Start with an overall shot. Let it show the context of your subject, a landmark, a signpost, a building or something else unique to that place.

Be discrete and unobtrusive. People may feel uncomfortable and object to you shooting. But sometimes it is worth making a nuisance of yourself for a good shot.

Prepare for Murphy's Law: if anything can go wrong it will go wrong.

Editing

Nowadays you do not cut celluloid footage into strips then sort them and splice them together. You do your editing entirely on a computer. No need for complicated editing software either as basic video-editing programs are installed on most new computers. Even elementary editing programs enable you to add titles, narration, music and special effects to a video. A witness video may best be left unedited if it is going to be used in court, otherwise your overall aim will be to give the video a particular viewpoint. So choose the best footage and put the bits in order to make your video flow the way you want it. Get the editing right and you will have a lot of satisfaction.

Distributing Your Video

You are not a video activist if you shut your video away in the attic. You must show your work to influence people and must therefore distribute it.

Show your video online if you have a web site or post it to a web site that displays people's videos, like YouTube or Google Video.
Describe your video to web site owners and ask them for a link from their web site to the page on your web site where viewers can see it. Give a reciprocal link to web site owners who link to your site.
Send out details of your video to potential customers and to anyone who might be interested in it. Briefly describe it (plus ordering information) and include a web address where they can see a preview.
Present your video at events arranged by animal activist organisations where audiences can view and discuss it.
After much experience you may find that you are exceptionally good at video activism. Then you may be in the market to sell footage to television. Who knows, you might hit the jackpot by catching a sensational event that television companies fall over themselves to air!

References & Reading

(1) Harding, Thomas. The Video Activist Handbook. Pluto Press: London. 2001xvi. 2nd edition.

Gregory, S; Caldwell, G; Avni, R; Harding, T & Gabriel, P. Video for Change: a guide for advocacy and activism. Pluto Press: London. 2005.