Being involved with the Back2School giveaway project last year, I’ve come to understand that this project is not about giving charity to strangers. Rather, its about taking care of and supporting our neighbors and community, regardless of race, religion or social status.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The average cost of school supplies for one child in the us is about $600. This is a situation that many Americans simply cannot afford.

Ideally if a family is in a tough situtation, the community would come together and alliviate and hardship. However we have a lack of familiarity with our neighbors to the point where we don’t even know their names, much less know if they ever need our help.

If this giveaway is taking place near you, then take the time out to get involved. Bring not only your own hands to the effort, but the hands of your friends as well.

Go to back2schoolgiveaway.com to learn more about this project.

It’s been over three months since I helped Ammar launch his unique brand of poetry online. I’ve posted up a “project profile” laying out exactly what the project was, what challenge we had in front of us, the approach we took and the impact that was achieved.

See here: Project Profile: Ammar Poetry

In this episode meet the people of Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, NY.

This documentary is an intimate portrait of dedicated New York Muslims who, despite the struggle with current political climate and firestorm of Park51 in the media that eventually leads to a neighborhood silently protesting their presence, believed in the power of giving back to the children of New York City as a tool for better social and political understanding.

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Personal Commentary

Have a Dedicated Photographer -
One of the challenges I had in editing this video together a few months back was the fact that I didn’t have a lot of good photos to work with. The person who took pictures for this event shot them at very low resolutions, making it’s useless for the purposes of this video. I did however manage to find some a handful of high res pictures which were used in this episode. Lesson: Make sure you have a professional photographer covering your events if you want quality pictures.

This episode is a little bit different in presentation from the other ICNA Back2School Giveaway episodes. Instead of the cinéma vérité style as I’ve done with the last three, this time around the volunteers give their voice directly.

This documentary is an intimate portrait of dedicated New York Muslims who, despite the struggle with current political climate and firestorm of Park51 in the media that eventually leads to a neighborhood silently protesting their presence, believed in the power of giving back to the children of New York City as a tool for better social and political understanding.

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Personal Commentary

Shorter Episode -
This episode is much shorter than the last few videos I’ve posted for one main reason. I arrived late to the giveaway, thus I didn’t get to capture the action as it unfolded. In fact, I almost missed the entire giveaway. I had the time on my personal planner written incorrectly.

When you’re not there to capture the events unfold, you capture the people’s thoughts and reflections of what took place. I compensated for the lack of b-roll footage by using the photography from the event which was done by some of the volunteers which I think resulted in a much more aesthetically pleasing presentation.

Black and White Sequence -
As a viewer you might be wondering why some sequences in the video are in black and white. The decision was more function than fashion. The lighting inside the lobby was dim. When I adjusted the brightness in post production, a lot of the random color “noise” got magnified. To effectively neutralize the random red, green and blue blocks I desaturated the image.

Photoshop Blunder –
At 00:36 you’ll notice that I’ve had a Photoshop blunder. Some of the people in line have been duplicated. Know that I wasn’t trying to artificially make the crowd seem bigger. When I separated the gentleman in the foreground, it left a lot of empty space. A large portion of the road and the left side of the building needed to be “reconstructed” thus I decided to use the handy “stamp” tool to cover over that blank space.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this episode of ICNA’s Back2School Giveaway watch:

• Omar and Omar come to terms with each other on who is the REAL Omar.
• Suffolk Country Executive Steve Levy asked straight why Peter King holds harsh views on Muslims
• The local Imam give a tour of the local Masjid called “Project Allahu Akbar”

This documentary is an intimate portrait of dedicated New York Muslims who, despite the struggle with current political climate and firestorm of Park51 in the media that eventually leads to a neighborhood silently protesting their presence, believed in the power of giving back to the children of New York City as a tool for better social and political understanding.

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Meeting the Soap Maker

While filming in Wyandanch, NY I had the pleasure of meeting a gentleman by the name of Bilal Hito. He’s a fellow Muslim who has been active in dawah online for a while. I had seen some of his videos, but never had the pleasure of meeting him. One of the interesting things about Bilal’s videos on YouTube is his nonchalant style of conversation. Not only does it really ropes you in but you learn quite a bit too.

A passion of Bilal’s is soap making, which I think is really cool.

You can check out his website here >> http://www.savondebilal.com, and watch his video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Lessons in Preparation

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If you’re going to be shooting outdoors, bring a polarizing filter.
Bring the polarizing filter is one of few things I forgot to do. Polarizing filters tend to bring out colors more, deepen the blue of the sky as well as remove unwanted shininess from reflective surfaces such as glass and plants. In simpler terms, it makes the image look better by reducing the amount of light that goes into the lens.

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Instead of deleting, format the camera’s hard drive.
If you happen to have a hard drive or SDHC based camera. You may find that if you simply delete footage from your camera when you’re connected to the computer and then later record again, playback on the camera will be troublesome. To avoid any problems make sure you “initialize” the camera. Simply format the drive once you’ve copied all necessary footage to your computer before you record again.

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Setup the Interview.
Take a moment to find a quiet(er) spot to film the interview of the subject you’re going to ask specific questions. It helps to have a tripod handy. It takes only five more minutes and the end result is exponentially more aesthetically pleasing. There will obviously be moments when setting up wont be an option, such as when I was following Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy. He gave a brief statement/interview at the end of his time there. I captured what I could get. Ironically, his on-camera statement was far more audible then everyone else. It helps when you regularly speak to people.

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Simplify your image by focusing on a single subject.
I’ve always been obsessed with getting the widest angle possible, but this past year I’ve come to learn that capturing everything doesn’t necessarily help in communicating human emotion. You have to really get in on the person and try to capture the emotions, expressions and behaviors of the individuals. I wish I had done that more on this project. I’ve made these realization only after the fact. At least I’ll be able to implement it on my next project.

In this episode of ICNA’s Back2School Giveaway watch:

• Asim struggle to assemble the easels as the group sets up the tent for the first giveaway.
• A short complication where ICNA organizers work with Mount Hope Masjid volunteers to resolve who gets the bags.
• Omar handle some rowdy little kids that get a little impatient in line.
• Cute little kids playing and eating food from the BBQ.

As mentioned in the last post:

This documentary is an intimate portrait of dedicated New York Muslims who, despite the struggle with current political climate and firestorm of Park51 in the media that eventually leads to a neighborhood silently protesting their presence, believed in the power of giving back to the children of New York City as a tool for better social and political understanding.

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Personal Reflections

Of all the locations that I filmed at, this was my favorite. It was the most visually interesting. So many urban bright colors on a bright sunny day made it feel like so much fun. I wish I had been recording further into the day to capture the children who knocked open the fire hydrant to play in the water. It looked like a stereotypical urban setting out of a movie or something.

Some things I wish I had shot which I didn’t were more personal close ups of the people who had attended as well as a time lapse of the street. It would have added some more eye candy to the short.

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Some Thoughts I Want Your Feedback On

An idea I have is to take the few short documentaries I have along with a few others and present them as a one feature with a central theme.

So for example:

• Tufaan (incomplete at the moment) – Getting involved in domestic disaster relief
• ICNA Back2School Giveaway – Giving back to neglected NYC communities

• (an idea) Islamic Relief – profiling Humanitaian Day, people giving back to America’s homeless
• (an idea) AlMaghrib Institute – each student body is engaged in some sort of social service project.
• (an idea) MSAs – Are they involved socially? What about MSAs in major cities? HOW are they reaching out socially?

My thoughts on the idea is that I see social outreach is about:

• Putting Muslims on the map-if they aren’t already
• Connecting with neighbors
• Connecting with the world around us and leaving an imprint

Great aspect of social services is that they appeal to EVERYONE. If you’re a human being you can benefit from it.

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This brings to mind another series of questions –

• How would I present such a feature?
• How can this project make money?
• How much will it cost to do the rest of the peices?
• How much do I personally want to get paid?
• How will it be financed? >> Can each short peice be crowdsourced one-by-one?

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To answer the above, I need to answer: What exactly am I selling?

Perhaps a “How to” on making a dawah or social service project successful? It can be an info product. Added bonuses could be content packed interviews that are filled with constructive advice and feedback from the top project coordinators.

Just an idea. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting up each day of the ICNA-NY Back2School Giveaway web documentary series. The video above is day 1 of 10.

As the story unfolds and communities are profiled you’re going to see that this documentary is an intimate portrait of dedicated New York Muslims who, despite the struggle with current political climate and firestorm of Park51 in the media that eventually leads to a neighborhood silently protesting their presence, believed in the power of giving back to the children of New York City as a tool for better social and political understanding.

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Personal Reflections

Personally I’ve found that one of the most challenging aspects of directing a documentary is getting the interviewee to coherently put their feelings into words. I’ve learned that asking the right questions is key to getting the right answers. The questions have to be directed towards their emotions.

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Ideally one would start editing a project in parallel to shooting it. The benefit of that is you’re able to catch any mistakes and issues while everything is still in play. This way as you progress forward you’ll have the best possible quality. Unfortunantly in this project’s case, due to the work load I already had I entered into post production only after I finished all the days of shooting.

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One major production lesson I can take away is:
Voice content of an interview takes priority over visual composition of the person speaking. When you’re a one-man crew you’ll have to make make sure there are enough b-roll visuals to cover an in-your-face close-up interview.

The best solution to get the best of audio and video is to get the assistance of an extra person to record to a seperate audio recording device such as a Zoom H4 or H4N via the use of a shotgun mic on a boom pole.

I set myself the challenge to tell the story of this project from the eyes of the volunteers themselves, showcase the struggles and challenges they themselves faced and the impact they had on the community.

The following video is an overview of the entire giveaway that took place.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The video was premiered at the volunteer appreciation lunch yesterday. I don’t remember much of the event considering I hadn’t slept for almost two days in order to deliver this video on time. In a week’s time I think I spent close to 80 hrs on the above video.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be releasing a short film of each of the individual locations that took place along with my own blogged commentary – so go ahead and subscribe to stay updated!

Ammar and I got together a couple months back and sat down to discuss what are some ways that he can get his poetry out more without having to travel so much and perform. The thing with entertainment is that a lot of it is pushed by event marketing. If that’s not an option either due to time and/or budget constraints then you have to really focus on content and online social engagement as much as you can.

In Ammar’s case, content doesn’t necessarily have to be in the form spoken word poetry – a great way to start – but it’s it should be the area of presenting who you are and what you care about.

A lot of content can be produced as a means of:

• Engaging people, such as answering each person’s questions and responding to comments in the form of video.
• Talking head videos talking about things that go with your brand – Ammar is the head of student leadership development and training with AlMaghrib Institute. He also takes AlMaghrib seminars, he can make talking head videos addressing topics that are relevant to the AlMaghrib student community or topics of general appeal that also resonate with the AlMaghrib community.

One of the things Ammar is doing is he’s translated poetry by Imam Shafiee from Arabic into English into eBook form. I think this is awesome. Here is a snippet from his Facebook page:

Let the days do as they please
And be optimistic when destiny decrees
Do not despair due to the events of nights past
For the events of this world were not meant to last

- Imam AlShafi’ee

Here’s another one:

I love the righteous though I am not of them
Lest that I receive through them intercession
And I despise those whose transactions are sins
Although we are similar in profession

-AlShafi’ee

If you want the full book free of charge – check out his website: iAmAmmar.com

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By the way,

When Ammar and I got together a few months back, he told me that the inspiration for the poem was a video my wife had made several years ago.

Here’s the original video that inspired the poem.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I want to give a huge shout out to Cyrus Hira from Blue Print Sound for putting together the sound effects, score and voice over for this new AlMaghrib trailer. He was the sound designer and engineer for this trailer. You did an excellent job buddy!

If you wish to contact Cyrus for work on a media project you’re producing, you can get in touch with him here: cyrus@blueprintsound.com

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A few days ago Ali and Noor over at AlMaghrib headquarters requested a re-edit of a trailer that was done by some one from the UK – I think – for the upcoming “Reviving the Islamic Spirit 2010″ conference.

This was the original trailer

Click here to view the embedded video.

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If you’re attending RIS 2010, make sure to check out the AlMaghrib booth in the bazaar.

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For those who don’t know, Cyrus is also the artist behind putting together the “Abdullah Puppet” intro theme song.

Click here to view the embedded video.