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99%Media Needs Your Help

Over a thousand hours of live coverage, hundreds of short films, several festival presences including Cannes, two feature-length documentaries and continuous news feeding on social networks. Since 2011, 99%Media members have worked tirelessly to produce quality content related to diverse issues of social justice. Our work has proven relevant and effective.

To our surprise, many people think we are a large organisation with significant financial resources to have accomplished so much in our first three years of existence.

The reality, though, is that we have done it all without any form of major funding other than our own personal time and resources, which at this point have become excessively strained.

In order for us to continue growing and producing more quality and relevant content we must ask for support as we launch our first full-scale funding  campaign.

 

Understanding The Costs Behind Creative Media Productions

The equipment required to create quality content is not cheap. They need maintenance and upgrades, especially at the rate at which we use them. While we don’t need top of the line gear, we do need equipment that is adequate to our needs and ambitions in regards to the rate and quality of the content we deliver to you, for free.

Also, to work at the level that we do, some relatively powerful editing workstations are necessary, along with storage systems that can keep up with the data rates of our massive captured material and to also be able to archive everything we document (which currently is in excess of 12TB).   Gear required for such workloads that are durable and robust are not cheap.

Since 2011, 99%Media has put out two feature documentaries, several hundreds powerful short documentaries and over a thousand hours of live video. Following industry standards, we have output the equivalent of work that would have cost us in excess of $4,000,000 to produce, using our own free time and our own personal resources. We love and believe in what we do, which is why we never asked for a single penny until we could no longer bear it simply by ourselves any further.

We live in a capitalist world that imposes limitations on what we can achieve without funding.  We are now presented with several dilemmas regarding how we move on and sustain the growth of our group. At this point, we need funding.

Our Dilemmas

99%Media has grappled with the idea of raising funds for a considerable amount of time now, as a result of this process we have been presented with a few dilemmas:

• To remain independent, 99%Media cannot accept funding from corporations that might otherwise attempt to manipulate or censor our content through “privileged”  interference or withdrawal of funding.
• 99%Media will not accept funding from political parties; we choose to remain non-partisan in the sense that we will not promote or give preference to any political party, especially since we consider that there is a systemic problem with the entire political spectrum and common pretentions of representation
• 99%Media believes in freedom of information and the free accessibility to that information. Therefore, 99%Media may not make it’s content unavailable to the public on the hope that we may gain some revenue from said content through any sort of pay-wall.
• 99%Media is a registered non-profit organisation that has no intent of generating  revenue from content or products and will not sell products for financial gain.

We are turning to you, the public, to help us.

Ways to Contribute

1. You may join the 99%Media group as a volunteer member and contribute your time, knowledge and experience.
2. Contribute your content: Articles, photographs, research, videos – Publish your work through 99%Media under a creative commons licence where you retain all rights to your work and material but allow for 99%Media to use and publish your content with attribution.
3. Donate in-kind: contribute by sharing our work and social financing campaign with everyone around you.
4. Make a financial contribution towards our crowdfunding  campaign.

 

What We Can Accomplish With Your Help

• We will be able to continue to produce quality content with a strong accent on social justice on a local, provincial, federal and international level.
• We start our own web TV channel which will produce impressive content for a new age of independent production.
• We will strive to be bi-lingually relevant.
• We will keep on organizing Courts Critiques.
• We will produce powerful feature-length documentaries and countless short films.
• We will fully realize our vision for what an independent, honest and capable media can be.

A donation to 99%Media is a contribution towards the production of these works, and thus becoming a part of this collective effort.

Project Recycled Security

Recycled Security is an ambitious documentary project that will combine the voices of aboriginal communities, immigrants, veterans, environmentalists, economists, military and security experts, human rights experts, judicial experts, union leaders, scientists, public administration experts, and political analysts to highlight and expose the social injustices committed by the current canadian government headed by prime minister Stephen Harper.

Although this documentary will target the political party in power (the Conservatives), it will not be a partisan work as it will not promote the views or political stances of other political parties like the Liberals, NDP, Greens, Block, or any other Canadian political party for that matter.  This documentary will be an overall criticism of the failure of the Canadian political system of governance which only happens to be currently controlled by the Conservative Party of Canada.

The main purpose of this documentary is to voice the discontent of the people with the way Canada is heading on local, provincial, federal and international level. It is a documentary on how Canadian citizens are gradually losing their rights that are protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A loss that is inevitably translating in to a worsening standard of living and the destruction of our collective culture, environment, health, and public ownership in the name of short sighted unsustainable “economic progress”.

This documentary is in fact a series of documentaries made up of a 2 hour main documentary and six 1 hour expanded topic documentaries.

This is a project that will take our production team across Canada to interview individuals and communities whose voices are rarely heard in the mainstream media with the objective of highlighting the main social justice issues faced by all canadians in our present era.

Project Lean

Will be a multifaceted project that tackles the mismanagement of public services by successive governments  and the introduction of the Lean system into public healthcare services. This project will consist of a major feature documentary on the Lean system in the public healthcare environment and will also consist of a web TV component that will give air time to knowledgeable academicians, activists, and professionals who will discuss the problems facing public services and what kind of solutions can be suggested.

 

Courts Critiques

A showcase of socially engaged social justice related short films created by artists and filmmakers from diverse horizons, with on-stage interventions and performances.

The success of Courts Critiques, a collaboration with Centre PHI, has been phenomenal to the extent that people had to be turned away at the door on both occasions. Occuring 2-3 times a year, this is a project that has taken on a life of it’s own and which is organized collectively by filmmakers from 99%Media, GAPPA, Les Alter Citoyens, as well as MADOC, Moïse Marcoux-Chabot, Vj Olilouya, and many more that are added at each installment. We wish to expand on this initiative and keep it growing.

Web Development

Our web presence is probably the most integral part of 99%Media.  A need to invest in the development of a new social platform specific to the needs of 99%Media will not be an easy task. Nor will developing a mobile platform application that is equally specific to 99%Media’s needs.  However, there is plenty of talented people  in Quebec and Canada who have the ability to pull this off given the chance. We would like to embark on projects to improve our online presence and make 99%Media a significant media portal.

Web TV and Radio

In parallel to 99%Media’s documentary and short film works, we are preparing the development of a web TV component; Multi-camera capability and improved live streaming services. The purpose of this evolutionary step is to provide high quality multi-camera production services to non-profit organisations that require it and whom can not afford this level of production under normal circumstances.

The purpose of this evolutionary step is also to allow 99%Media members and affiliates to create their own multi-camera TV shows – the possibilities of this type of content is endless.

Many of our members have more 10 years of experience running this kind of a production and can deliver content to rival that of the main stream media networks and make the content far more pertinent to the social justice cause.

This project will also have a web radio component that will be equally significant and offer high quality content.

Some costs to take into account: internet connections with massive bandwidth uses and abuses, streaming service subscriptions, cameras, lights, sound equipment and hardware to allow us to live stream and cut directly on air. To set something like this up can be prohibitively expensive, however, due to the expertise of some of our members, we can do this at a fraction of the cost it would take the main stream media to do.

News Room

One of our intended goals is to provide our audience with news coverage in the form of the News room project. This project will be dedicated to reporting the news with analysis for the online and independent age.

Freelance Journalists and Writers

People who do journalistic work or are inspirational writers live off the words they write. 99%Media would like to be able to publish the works of these inspirational journalists and writers but we need to take into account that they will require a form of remuneration for their submissions. Through the funding of this initiative, 99%Media would like to eventually become an all encompassing socially engaged media distributor and outlet that offers free content to the public.

Workshops

99%Media has professional members who would love to give workshops and training in order for anyone who wishes to learn more about the intricacies of the media world and the production of audio/video content.

Production Equipment

Cameras, lights, audio, video, workstations and support systems are the main tools for modern filmmakers. These are items that will need to last us for several years before becoming obsolete. This is equipment that we will be sharing with all 99%Media active members and which we can lend to our partner groups and trusted individuals.  While it is possible to rent some of this equipment, availability is not always assured and at times it can be constricting, especially when the equipment is needed on a moment’s notice. It would be much more efficient to have our own equipment for our own productions. Maximizez efficiency and performance for the foreseeable future has been taken into account for every little piece. It is worth noting that for what we are getting at this price tag is very cost effective when compared to studios that spend orders of magnitude this amount on more expensive solutions.  We have very carefully selected every item so that it would have more than one intended use. Modularity is the key to keeping our costs this low.

Post-Production Equipment

In the edit room is where all the magic happens. Powerful systems are required to be able to handle all the high quality video and HD processing needs required by our artists and editors. Video also takes up a lot of space, thus vast amounts of storage are required, not just for direct work, but also for archiving. New up-to-date software is also required to run on these systems.  We believe that our requirement of two powerful workstations will be good enough to serve the needs of 99%Media for at least the next 5 years before becoming obsolete.  It is our expressed hope that 10 years from now it will no longer be necessary to invest in powerful systems like these as a lot of traditional post-production tasks will have become cloud based. There already are initiatives being developed towards this end but the technology and the infrastructure is not yet mature enough and still too costly to make it a viable choice for quality low budget productions. Until then, with your help, we will continue to rely on powerful workstations to deliver our productions at the best possible level and maintain a coherent archive of our collective works.

Support 99%Media

The promise we make you all is that by supporting 99%Media, social justice issues will be made more visible and accessible through our collective work.

The 99%Media group thank you all for whatever you can do to support our initiatives.

Help us grow and become part of the 99%Media experience.

 

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