It’s time to stand up and speak out against the terrible things that are perpetrated on people in the name of health care. Here are three films I directed and shot along with Scott Anger as part of a campaign to Stop Torture in Healthcare.
Do you want to do something about this problem? Send a letter to the Namibian Health Minister to demand an end to forced sterilization of HIV positive women.
Here are the two other films we did for the campaign:
Vlad is suffering from incurable brain cancer. Despite his chronic pain, doctors in Ukraine are only allowed to prescribe 50 mg of pain medicine. In another country, doctors would typically prescribe more than 2,000 mg for a patient like Vlad.
In many countries, governments forcibly detain people as a form of “treatment” for medical conditions such as drug addiction, mental disability, or tuberculosis. This is a story about Venta, a former drug abuser in Cambodia.
Excerpts from five recent projects where I directed and also did the cinematography. I’d love it if you watch the full films
The full versions of these stories were edited by Linda Hattendorf (Namibia), Chad Stevens (New Orleans), Scott Anger (Ukraine) and me (Dwayne Betts and Cambodia).
Scott Anger co-directed and also did the sound and additional camera on the Namibia, Ukraine and Cambodia excerpts.
Brad Hamilton shot second camera on the Dwayne Betts interviews.
New Orleans suffered devastating blows on many levels from Hurricane Katrina. But the storm gave the city the unique opportunity to start over from scratch and to try to re-imagine government and other institutions.
Five years later the Open Society Institute wanted to look at three areas to see if things had changed. I spent a week with three characters to try to answer that question.
This is the last part of that short film, looking at online journalism.
You can see all three stories at the Open Society Foundations website, U.S. Programs. I directed and recorded the story on a Canon 5d, Scott Anger recorded the sound, Chad Stevens edited and Pamela Chen of the Soros Foundation was the executive producer.
Dwayne Betts tells his story very well and what a story he’s lived.
This is my favorite story from the five videos I produced for the Open Society Foundation,U.S. Programs, Criminal Justice Fellows.
Formerly incarcerated, Betts is an author, poet and teacher.
You can see all Six of the videos at the Open Society Foundations U.S. Programs Multimedia page
I worked as the Director of Photography and shot the video and some of the stills for the profiles of two winners of the 2010 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Awards. Julie Winokur from Talking Eyes Media produced this piece on Doctor Ellen Beck, a remarkable woman who has managed to set up free health clinics to server the hopeless and most important, the underserved, in San Diego, California.
Dr Ellen Beck, UCSD Student-Run Free Clinic Project, San Diego from bob sacha on Vimeo.
A Talking Eyes Media Production
Producer Julie Winokur
DP Bob Sacha
DP for interview Lou Weinert
Second Camera Marshall Leaman
Editor Richard Poller
Assistant Editor Elissa Mummolo
This is short film I made with a point-and-shoot pocket-sized digital camera.
It was the opening piece for a lecture on travel photography at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY. The series was called Wish You Were Here.
I know what “transparency” is but mostly from my days as a photojournalist working with color slide film. So when the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) came to MediaStorm to create a multimedia piece explaining what they did, it took me a while to figure it out. In the process, I learned a lot more.
For this story, I had the pleasure of traveling to London. Berlin and Washington to interview 6 people that represented all sides of the issue. Fifty or more countries in the world are rich in resources: gold, silver & oil but more than half of their population lives below the poverty line. This projects looks at why.
Maybe the new paradigm is someone like me traveling with 2 HDV cameras, tripods and mic stands plus my laptop. In each country, I worked with a camera person (Kimberley Williams in Washington, DC, Karveh Shirdell in London and Bjorn Forster in Berlin. We used a single light for the interviews. I edited the transcripts and pictures and cut the piece.
Of course, none of this would be possible without all the amazing photographers bravely working in these countries.
Thanks to all for teaching me so much.
Starbucks brought their “partners” to New Orleans, 10,000 strong, for a management conference but also to pitch in for 4 hours each of community service. Yes, that’s 40,000 hours of community service. It was a wonderful thing to see.
I lit and shot the interviews and also shot video and stills in the field but the most fun was shooting and editing the small piece in the middle the this great story where Mary O’Connor and her team try to serve 10,000 cups of hot coffee to every one of the partners in the audience at the same time. Phew, what a race that was.
I had spent a year in New Orleans (pre Katrina) working on a story for National Geographic Magazine so I was thrilled to go back with my MediaStorm colleagues in 2008 to shoot, interview and record this multimedia piece for Starbucks.
I’ve started to establish a new standard for editing images and video and I’m calling it the “jaw dropping” moment form of editing.
If my jaw drops open when I see it, I tag it and keep it. Or if I exclaim, out loud in the office, “holy X&!#!” I usually mark and keep that frame or section. (Lucky for me my colleagues put up with my id.)
I did a lot of jaw dropping and exclaiming when I was producing and editing my most recent MediaStorm piece for the International League of Conservation Photographers. The photography is amazing and the video by James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey made my jaw drop and caused an expletive. Balog and his team have turned what’s going on with climate change into stunning motion.
As usual, I learned some new things. One of them is that great photography and video stops you in your tracks, and when it’s connected with important issues, it has the power to engage and hopefully motivate people. This project also reminded me that everything in our world is connected.
The video is a “run away” but I’m sure the folks at ILCP will fix that soon.
Clearing the Air, China’s Environmental Challenge. is a project I produced and edited using some amazing China photos. Plus this project gave me the chance to sit down and interview Orville Schell on camera for 2 hours. Wow, that was a treat.
For me, this was an interesting return to the subject of China, where I spent many weeks photographing two stories for National Geographic Magazine in the past decade. The changes are staggering and the interview was really illuminating.
Check out the Room with a View section also, which shows the quality of Beijing’s air every day viewed from the same spot.
The state of Beijing's Air
