{"id":533,"date":"2007-11-28T16:36:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-28T16:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mediaforsocialchange.wordpress.com\/2007\/11\/28\/my-media-for-change-career-thus-far"},"modified":"2016-06-20T03:17:50","modified_gmt":"2016-06-20T03:17:50","slug":"my-media-for-change-career-thus-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/2007\/11\/28\/my-media-for-change-career-thus-far\/","title":{"rendered":"My Media for Change Career Thus Far"},"content":{"rendered":"

My biggest challenge in starting this media for change career is sustaining myself. I mentioned before that I was working in commercial television, mostly Viacom, and I was turning out stuff like this:<\/p>\n

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(That guy who wins a bunch of money and gets flown to NYC is a silhouette of me)<\/div>\n
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Here’s another of some footage that I shot at Coney Island:<\/div>\n
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They were fun to make in a high pressure kind of way and I got paid for working on them, but they are primarily advertisements dressed up in eye candy. I wanted to create videos with more substance so I worked on an a PBS American Masters on Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun<\/a>. I also edited this for the United Nations High Commission for Refuges:<\/div>\n
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I believe they’re speaking in Kirundi. <\/div>\n
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These are exactly the types of projects that I want to work on. The problem is that they usually have non-existent budgets and long lines of interns and volunteers eager to work for free so this has my pro bono side work. I want to make a career out of this kind of stuff, but I’m having trouble figuring out just how to do it full time with without a trust fund.<\/div>\n
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Last year, I came close to getting paid to do documentaries. I got a year long grant from AmeriCorps<\/a> to be a disaster responder for the American Red Cross in Greater New York<\/a>. It was an incredible experience. New York City gets on eight fires on average a day and the Red Cross goes to each of them to provide emergency shelter and financial aid. My primary role was to report to disasters<\/a>, but along the way I got the Red Cross to buy a cheap 3CCD camera<\/a>. I made a DVD based on interviews from an international symposium on terrorism. I also shot some footage while working on a flood relief job and created this documentary:<\/div>\n
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The Red Cross Nor’Easter movie was kind of a break through for me. I was working with a humanitarian organization, feeling like I was making a difference, and when I had a chance I would crack a few shots with my camera to illustrate the nature of the disaster and the importance of the work that we were doing.<\/div>\n
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I’ve decided to up the ante. I’ve applied to the Peace Corps<\/a>. I was nominated for a Public Health program in Francophone, Sub-Saharan Africa. I was supposed to deploy in Septembe. It’s practically December and I’m still in the US. The Peace Corps is a government organization under the ominous umbrella of the US Department of State<\/a>. My application has been slowly moving through the bureaucracy for almost a year and a half now. At this point I think it’s lost just about all momentum. It’s gotten so bad that I wrote to my hometown, Congresswoman Heather Wilson NM-R<\/a>. She’s pretty conservative (Karl Rove pat Wilson commended for her gung-ho support for the Iraq War when he was recently interviewed by Charlie Rose), but I’m told that she’s like the Godfather when it comes to constituent services.<\/div>\n

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I’ve been thinking about doing it since I got out of college. I decided at that point that it was the scariest thing I could possibly think of doing and so I decided to pursue it. Living and working in a developing country for two years and three months would give me insight into culture, life, and international issues in a way that being a tourist could not. However, keeping up with my video projects could potentially be difficult in a village without electricity. The Peace Corps are sending me out there to work on hygiene and HIV\/AIDS awareness, not cameras and videotapes. In a situation like this where the location is remote and resources are limited, making movies will have to be an independent endeavor and it’s going to take a lot of resourcefulness and ingenuity on my part.<\/div>\n
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That got me thinking. If I’m going to be on my own when it comes to filmmaking, why not be completely independent. For that I’m going to need a Plan B.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My biggest challenge in starting this media for change career is sustaining myself. I mentioned before that I was working in commercial television, mostly Viacom, and I was turning out stuff like this: (That guy who wins a bunch of money and gets flown to NYC is a silhouette of me) Here’s another of some …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[138],"class_list":["post-533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-unhcr-red-cross-3ccd-camera-peace-corps-commercial-television-public-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1143,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions\/1143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}