Depth of Field | The 4:Minute.Media Update: Winter 2007

		SUMMer2007

On the beach of Kasansero, Uganda, a boy with a toy gun walks through the middle of his friends playing soccer. Kasensero is where it is believed AIDS first began its spread to the rest of Africa, and the world, in the early 1980s.

Sean Sheridan/4MM photograph.

The man appeared from nowhere. There was no questioning his intent. He wanted to kill us. He wanted to kill himself. As The End of Poverty author Jeffrey Sachs puts it in a recent Vanity Fair article, “If you haven’t noticed, people are dying. It’s an emergency.” On the ground in Africa, we notice.

Principal's perspective

Dear Friend,

Testimony:Africa is now in post-production, the first installment of our film and book series exploring major issues around the world through first-person stories.

Each Testimony installment will have an HD broadcast film along with a coffee table book. This first project deals with three compelling first-person accounts of AIDS, genocide, and hunger in Sub-Sahara Africa. Part of the proceeds of the product sales will go toward sustainable development efforts in the communities where we shot, photographed and wrote the stories.

Testimony:Africa is an amazing project. We hope you take the time to learn a little more about what we're doing, and why. Although we're still working on the full web site, you can watch the film's trailer right now.

If this is the first time you've received an email from us, it's because you have, in some way, been linked to this project. If you'd rather not get a update every few months, simply click the unsubscribe link below. Otherwise, count on future updates and a web site full of the who, what, why, when and where.

Want to get involved? We still need partners for marketing, publishing, and distribution, as well as people who are willing to help us tell these amazing stories. Check out Testimony:Africa and give us a call. We'd love to hear what you think.

719.229.8559

sean@4minutemedia.com
www.4minutemedia.com

We had just broken through the stifling smog of Nairobi’s snarled, sputtering traffic and were heading north towards the town of Nakuru on a cement-barrier divided roadway. Our driver, Kenyan-born Jack Opondo, had been making up lost time at a steady clip of 50 MPH in the lane next to the concrete wall.

That’s when we saw the man running full speed right down the middle of our lane, straight for us. His rose-colored, full-length coat flapped behind him. With no room to swerve and traffic pushing up fast behind us, Jack did the only sensible thing when a running man is about to crash through your windshield. He simply said, “Jesus.” He wasn’t swearing. He was calling for help. The man feinted ever so slightly right, as if nudged aside by an invisible hand. We missed him, or he missed us, as it were, by a matter of inches. We spun around, stunned, and watched him disappear into the grills and headlights behind us.

This man seemed a perfect metaphor for what our three-man crew is doing here. We are willingly hurtling ourselves full speed toward what we consider Africa’s three biggest crises — AIDS, genocide, and hunger. Perhaps we are just as crazy. We’re in Africa shooting a documentary film and writing and photographing the accompanying coffee-table book, but we don’t know where the stories will lead us, exactly. All we know is that both film and book will raise awareness about these issues and show positive solutions to what many consider intractable problems.

Our travels will take us to places like a brothel at the heart of the AIDS crisis in a filthy, disease-infested fishing village in Uganda where AIDS is believed to have begun its spread to the rest of Africa in the early 1980s; to Sudan and a refugee camp crowded with 61,000 people including 15-year-old children who were born and have lived their entire lives here, in danger each night from raiding horsemen who kill and rape; to a famine-conscious community in the southern highlands of Ethiopia where we stand at grave’s edge watching a coffin being lowered into the ground containing a woman we had seen alive 100 miles away the day before and whose 8-year-old son, now an orphan, watches too, hunched over, sobbing; and to a clinic where we sit with another orphaned boy, this one 14, with arms no bigger than the fragile spoke on a wagon wheel, as he waits nervously for the results of the HIV test....

The 4MM team that produced the Testimony:Africa project, from left to right Sean Sheridan, Michael Myers, and Brian Sytsma.

Three stories, three subjects, three countries, and three crew members. After all the planning, 4MM Principal Sean Sheridan, New York-based fashion photographer Michael Myers, and World Vision Writing Creative Director Brian Sytsma completed production of Testimony:Africa this summer in Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia. The final film and book product is slated for a Fall 2007 release. Stay tuned!

moving pictures

30 Hour Famine Preview
This year, more than 1 million teens in 21 countries will unite to help children living in some of the most deplorable conditions on earth. See how 4MM is helping them do this with the just-released Famine Preview Video.

PRINT MEDIA

VIVA Network USA Expansion
4:Minute.Media completed the first print media of a USA branding campaign that will include a new web presence for VIVA USA. Check out the USA Brochure now.

RADIO

For those of you that missed it, The World Vision Report recently aired an interview with host Peggy Wehmeyer and Sean Sheridan about the escalating situation in Zimbabwe. Listen to it now (wait for short mp3 download).