Lights Camera Liberty

Lights, Camera, Liberty, the Series: Part IV

Crystal Hubbard Leave a comment

This week we’re highlighting some work from the public interest legal organization the Pacific Legal Foundation based out of Sacramento, as we continue the Lights, Camera, Liberty series.

This particular video focuses on the recent legal battles of Drakes Bay Oyster Company, a family farm who harvests organic oysters, providing local, sustainable good eats for Marin County, California. Check out the short video and commentary below to learn more about the case!


Albert Im, the media content producer for PLC, discusses his creative approach to telling this story,

We wanted to show the faces behind the people who are affected [by bad farming policy].

I really wanted to show the land and the different colors of the land since the case revolves around a nursery, and essentially, farmers.  These are people who works with their hands and have a feel for the earth.  I also wanted to them in action as they did their daily work.  

I tried to personalize the story and make it more universal so that people understand that this can happen to anyone and any business.  I wanted to tell the story about one family that’s fighting the government with the help of Pacific Legal Foundation, so that others out there who might be dealing with similar issues or problems don’t have to be afraid.

Lights, Camera, Liberty, the Series: Part III

Crystal Hubbard Leave a comment

Part three of our multi-part series (see here and here) comes from The Seasteading Institute. The San Francisco-based, Peter Thiel co-founded organization is doing exciting work in developing alternative, watery ways of living on earth. Seasteading has become an increasingly popular topic of intellectual discussion in recent years, and for those of you keeping up with HBO’s Silicon Valley, it has acquired a particular cultural je ne sais quoi.

In their words…

Seasteading is such a wide and deep subject it’s very difficult to sum up for people. The creation of this video is a lesson in how many complex technologies can be summed up by focusing on shared goals.

Joe Quirk, Director of Communications, on how the project came together:

Seasteaders gathered from all over the world at our Seasteading Conference in San Francisco in 2012. Even though I was a committed seasteader, I was astounded by the number of ideas from different industries for how to create floating civilizations on the seas. Nathan Green, who was charged with creating a video to capture the essence of seasteading, couldn’t see how he was going to make a video capturing two days of presentations on technical aspects of ocean law, ocean farming, maritime engineering, algal fuel, “bluegreen technologies,” and environmental cleanup. Then I gave a speech summing up what everybody was doing, and, Nathan said, “The video should be based on that speech.”

Then a truly collaborative process began among everybody at the Institute, as we worked to feature a dozen key speakers and their goals in less than three minutes. Working together, we created something that was more concise and elegant than 25 presentations by 25 experts.  We managed to sum up an effort we thought was impossible to [to do].

Lights, Camera, Liberty: A Series

Crystal Hubbard 2 Comments

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be posting videos submitted by participants in The Atlas Network’s “Lights, Camera, Liberty” program. Each member organization has been asked to share a short (in some cases, short-ish) video that they produced and best shows off their mission-in-action, as well as their filmmaking chops.

This week’s video comes from FIRE, a non-profit organization based in Philadelphia.

 

 

Here’s FIRE discussing their video submission:

The mission of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE’s core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.

When Chris Morbitzer and his University of Cincinnati (UC) chapter of Young Americans for Liberty sought permission to gather signatures across UC’s campus for a time-sensitive, statewide ballot initiative, their request was denied. Morbitzer was told that if he and his group were seen gathering signatures outside of the school’s tiny and restrictive “free speech zone,” campus security would be called and they could be arrested.

“I think it is absurd that they were threatening to put me in jail for exercising what is a constitutional right,” says Morbitzer in FIRE’s latest video.

Dismayed that he might not be able to gather many signatures if he was confined to a free speech zone that comprised just 0.1% of campus, Morbitzer took a bold step: He sued his university.

“Me suing the university felt a lot like David versus Goliath,” says Morbitzer, “like, I stood no chance at all because, you know, I’m just a little student.”

On far too many campuses nationwide, universities unreasonably restrict students’ expressive activities to limited areas—so-called “free speech zones.” When challenged in the court of law and the court of public opinion, these zones routinely lose.

In this video, we chronicle Morbitzer and his student group’s fight against their school’s attempts to limit their speech. In the process, we examine the problem of restrictive free speech zone policies on and off campus—policies that exile would-be speakers to far off corners of their campuses or, in some cases, place protesters behind barbed-wire fences.