Hometown Baghdad: Reality through Film.

The Story of our Production - Part 2

Sorry for my inactive posting recently.  I have been busy doing press and grassroots marketing for Hometown Baghdad.  If you want to catch up on previous episodes, check out www.hometownbaghad.com.

And for recent press stories, check out our stories in the Times of London and NPR.

And hear is the continuation of the story of our production. 

After we sent the money to our crew in Baghdad, they immediately went to work.  Producer Fady Hadid and director Ziad Turkey put together their team and gave out questionnaires to the participants. We found out everything that they were planning on doing for the next few months - family events, vacations, important happenings at school, hanging out with friends, etc.  And we, on the American side, began to work with Fady and crew to figure out what kinds of stories we wanted to follow in each of their lives.  We realized that most of what Saif was doing was planning for his departure from Iraq. So we made a point to film him doing all the major things he needed to do before he left - packing, saying goodbye to friends, getting a last minute dental surgery, etc.  Ausama was finishing his studies and going on vacation.  (Little did we know at that point how dramatic Ausama's story would be by the end of the production.)  And Adel was trying to spend time with his band and figure out other ways to express his emotions through art and music. 

With those rough story ideas, Fady arranged the shots, got permits (an incredible feat in war-torn Baghdad) and began production.  After every shoot day, Fady would send us a summary of what happened and what they had on film.  The executive producers, Kate Hillis and Laurie Meadoff, and I would go through the write up and give Fady comments and suggestions on what else we would want. We also at this point bought personal camcorders for each of the participants and sent them to Iraq. Fady distributed them and instructed each participant to film their lives when the crews weren't around.  Some of that footage ended up being among the most intimate and moving of all. 

After a few weeks of shooting, Adel and Ausama left Iraq for a few weeks of vacation.  And Saif left for good.  So Fady and the crew took a break while making sure that Adel and Ausama were continually shooting more for us.  Fady also sent us all of the footage that they had shot so far.  Miraculously, that package made it through customs immediately and was sitting on my desk one Monday morning.  I got a scissors, open up the package and began, along with the rest of the Chat team and some very dedicated interns, to go through the tapes, discovering along the way a perspective on Iraq and the war that the mainstream media had completely ignored up until that point.

Stay tuned for the next part of our story.

The Story of our Production - Part 1

This will be the first in a series of posts that i want to put up here that describe how this project came to fruition:

The idea for a series telling the untold stories of everyday life in Baghdad grew out of a previous project by Chat the Planet.  In 2004, we produced a special for MTV's Choose or Lose Campaign called: "Chat the Planet's Baghdad 2-Way."  In that show, students from Kent State Univ. and Baghdad Univ. spoke via satellite conferencing about the war, life and politics.  It was a co-production between us and a fantastic crew in Iraq who were the most professional, cool, brave and talented people this side of, I dunno, this side of the world.  And so we stayed in touch with them trying to develop an idea for a series based around young Iraqis and young Americans forming relationships.  We raised some non-profit money to fly the prodoucers to New York for a series of development meetings.  While they were here, we bonded immediately and formed really deep friendships.  We developed a show idea and began trying to sell it to cable networks in the US.

A few said no.  A few said it didn't fit with their "brand."  And a few were somewhat interested.  So we keep developing the idea further and further.  While we were busy developing the idea further, the situation in Iraq was getting worse and worse by the second.  And as John Lennon said, "Life is what happens when you're making other plans."  I probably got the wording wrong, but you know what I mean. Ultimately, we realized that if we didn't get into production soon, we were going to lose our cast and crew in Baghdad.  Many of them were trying to leave Iraq for safety abroad.  So we decided to go it alone, without any network backing us, and document the stories of the cast members we had chosen with our Iraqi partners.   We raised some money from the incredibly great people at the Shei'rah Foundation and Cinereach, wired it to Baghdad and the crew began shooting.....

More to come soon.

Episode 9

Making a documentary in a war-zone is inherently dangerous.  Film crews in Baghdad are a target.  And our producers in Baghdad were not always able to be with the subjects.  And this episode uncovers how we dealt with that problem.  Tags: iraq, baghdad, war, vlog, series, documentary, hometown,

Episode 8

A side of Baghdad that even most Iraqis probably don't ever see...
Digg it here. Also, Hometown Baghdad was featured on All Things Considered, a program on NPR (National Public Radio in America). Listen to it here. For those of you outside of America, NPR does incredible work. The quality of their reporting is remarkable. And they made special mention of a conversation between Ed and Zaid in the comments of this blog. Kudos to you guys! So everyone please continue to watch, continue to think, continue to talk, continue to spread these stories from Iraq. In other news, "Symphony of Bullets" was made popular on Digg today!

Episode 7

Episode seven is here. Gunfire has become the soundtrack to life in Baghdad...and owning a gun seems like a necessity. My close friend and Hometown Baghdad producer extraordinaire Fady once said that at this point standing on a street with a gun in Baghdad is safer than standing on the street with a camera. Please let us know what your reactions are both in the comments on this blog and on the comments on youtube.
Tags: baghdad, iraq, vlog, series, war, peace, youth,

Episodes 4, 5 and 6

Here are the next three videos in the series.  Stay tuned for stories from the production:

Hometown Baghdad Launches

Salon has posted the first three videos of Hometown Baghdad. Check out their dedicated page for the series here. And we're also on the homepage. For ease of viewing, I'm embedding the videos below. And remember, with today's technology viewers are the new distributors. Help us tell the story of today's Iraq by linking back here. Adel - "Brains on Campus" Saif - "The Dentist" Ausama - "Forbidden Salad" Tags: baghdad, iraq, documentary, video

Launch Date for Web Series Confirmed

We have confirmed that we’ll be releasing the first three webisodes of Hometown Baghdad on Monday, March 19th. That date is significant because it is the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. A lot has changed for normal, everyday Iraqis in these past four years and hopefully our series will show the world what their lives are like today. However dramatic and moving these stories are, we intend this series to be apolitical. Perhaps it will spur some dialogue or make a few people think differently. And that may be good. But as filmmakers and producers, we simply want to introduce these people and tell their stories.

After the initial three webisodes premiere, we will debut a new webisode on Wednesday the 21st and then again on Friday the 23rd. After that, a new video will come out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday thereafter for the next several weeks.

Making an online series look like one

with long form television content, it is very easy to make something look like a series to a first time viewer.  get a theme song, cut together a montage, hold for a second on each major character for a second as they flash a toothy grin.  But with a web series, especially shorts, this is much more difficult.  with lonelygirl15, they tried to pass it off as a real video weblog so they purposefully didn't do an open.  we are ACTUALLY real but we want to be very clear about what we are from the get go.  We have cut together a really short, simple opening that just shows an image of baghdad and has the series name appear in a tasteful way.  we've also decided not to throw up a card explaining what the series is.  we're confident that this is the best way - the series name and the subsequent episode names that appear should do enough to communicate that this is a series.  not to mention the metadata that will appear next to the videos when they're posted on various sites.  is there an example of a web series that has an opening that we can look at? 

Hometown Baghdad nears launch

Avid has asked me to keep a blog with them covering my company's most recent documentary project, Hometown Baghdad (let's call it HB for now).  HB was produced by Chat the Planet and shot by a group of award-winning Iraqi filmmakers about the lives of young people in Baghdad.  It tells incredible stories that American camera crews could never get – the most intimate portraits of what life is really like in Baghdad.  HB will be released on several online outlets – including Joost, Youtube, etc. – in 2-3 minute vignettes beginning in late March/early April.  We are timing this release in order to take advantage of the 4-year anniversary of the Iraq war to get people thinking about the people in Baghdad that aren't soldiers, politicians or insurgents…the regular people.

It was obviously edited on Avid (two PCs running avid xpress pro to be exact).  It was an interesting project production-wise for a couple of reasons. 1) It was produced in Baghdad which meant that every day was a risk. Our subjects and crew risked their lives on a daily basis to get this footage. 2) Due to a few reasons I'll get into later, we shot on both NTSC and PAL and had to deal with that in the post process.  3) We decided halfway through the post production process that we wanted to distribute the material directly to the web.  And that changed the way we thought about editing, pacing, story arcing, sound quality, video quality, transfer quality, etc. 

Stay tuned.  I'll be posting the webisodes as we release them in a week or two.