The story of Franny Armstrong

March 1st, 2009

Franny Armstrong by any measure is an exceptional woman. And Franny had a burning desire to tell a story through a film that to was her, extremely important. That story is called The Age of Stupid, a story about climate change

And here is a more in depth explanation of her extraordinary project

Armstrong, the daughter of BBC human rights documentary producer Peter, comes from the first environmentally aware generation. Her film does not seek, like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, to prove climate change is happening. Narrative, not just facts, she believes, is needed to make people understand what is at stake. writes John Vidal. For me what is interesting is that Franny is a No Straight Line thinker and doer. She subverted the obstacles placed before her in making, producing and distributing her story.

For example

They bypassed the banks and went straight to ordinary people for cash, developing the idea of “crowd-funding”. The first £50,000 was raised in a London bar on a single night in December 2004, and the £530,000 raised so far has come from 228 people who have invested between £500 and £35,000 each. There are still seven £10,000 shares available.

Aside from a few relatively wealthy people, many investors are made up of groups. There’s a mothers’ group, a hockey team and a women’s health centre. The investors will get their money back if the film takes £1m. “Our lawyer said it was the most original film-funding scheme he’d seen,” says Armstrong.

In addition to the innovative funding model, Stupid has broken new ground by relying on volunteers to translate the film into more than 30 languages.

Often, I have made the observation that in the networked society, and in a world where we are reaching to find those things that mean the most to us, that people will form groups around:

[1] Passions

[2] Values

[3] Desires

The power, and potential of this type of organisation is called Group Forming Networks, described by David Reed

As the scale increases, what’s important also shifts. When Sarnoff’s Law dominates, content such as TV programs is king. When Metcalfe’s Law kicks in, transactions are king. When the Group-Forming Law takes hold, communities are king.

And even the distribution model is also based upon an No Straight Line approach, “The usual film model is that the distributor pays the producer a pittance called an advance – and for that takes all rights to the film. Which means it belongs to them. If the filmmaker wants to have a screening of the film, they have to get permission from the distributor. So we came up with a new model whereby we employ the distributor, we keep all the rights, the money goes through us and we pay them a cut. This means we will be able to allow all sorts of small-scale school/church/campaign screenings which are not usually possible.” The film is not only being premiered in the UK but beamed to 65 cinemas around the world simultaneously which means

If Armstrong gets her way, which she usually does, The Age of Stupid will be seen by 250 million or more people in the run up to the crucial UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December and will inspire an army of people to force world governments to take action.

This also got me thinking about communities and identity and also the idea of what Henry Jenkins describes as Spreadable Media.

And as Richard Sennett wrote we want to

recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time. We want the shared ability for work to teach us how to govern ourselves and to connect to other citizens on common ground.

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