HELP!

As you may or may not know on Monday I returned from Nicaragua at the end of a two-week trip where I completed the bulk of the production for The Trek Project (thetrekproject.blogspot.com). The Trek Project is a 3 part multi-media exploration of the way that we (people living in the United States) create and work within communities both at home and abroad. The first part of the project is a timeline of US-Latin American relations that will be incorporated into the final DvD. The second part is a series of Mapping Workshops and Discussions about the concept of global community, responsibility, and accountability.
Due to the fact that it was only possible for me to travel to Nicaragua with the Trek team as a single person the creation of this project, has, up until this point been primarily a solo process. I have had a number of meetings with people to discuss the project and build the concept into what it is now; however, in terms of production I have flown solo. Now I am looking for people who are interested in helping me more directly with the post-production process. I am looking for:

• Help (or continued help) with concept development
• Periodic feedback on cuts of the movie
• Help working on a soundtrack
• Help with Audio post-production in general
• Someone who can show me how to use After Effects
• Help with animation
• Help with checking Spanish-English translations
• Help creating subtitles in both Spanish and English
• Fiscal Sponsorship, or people with a head for fundraising
• Art, by independent artists (visual, digital, written, performed, or musical), that deals with issues of globalization, Latin America, the creation of communities, or any other related issues, to potentially be interviewed, speak about their art who have a piece featured in the documentary.
• Places and/or groups to hold Mapping Workshops with

If you have skills in any of these areas or know someone who does and is interested let me know! Everyone who participates in the creation of this project receives credit and a copy, for certain jobs monetary compensation might also be possible depending on the budget of the project.

***Also, I would absolutely love to have any buildOn students who are interested in the project and want to get involved in anyway.

Thank you for your continued support-

Helyx Chase
HHProductions
HHconnects@gmail.com
thetrekproject.blogspot.com

Back from Nicaragua

Monday evening at about 7 pm EST I arrived in NYC back from 2 weeks in Nicaragua. The Trip consisted of about 4 travel days and 10 days in the community of Gualacatu, North of the city of Jalapa, about a kilometer from Honduras. I come back to the United States with a collection of written, photographic, drawn, and video taped representations of Gualacatu, a community that opened their hearts and homes to a group of 10 high school students from New York and Philadelphia, 2 program coordinators from buildOn, 2 New York City High School teachers, 3 Nicaraguan translators, and 1 videographer. I begin now to put together the writting, drawings, interviews and 13 and a half hours of video footage into the final project, and I begin now to insert pieces of that process into this blog, starting with this excerpt from the journal I kept during the trip:

"What becomes apparent to me as I return to buildOn is that the organization serves 2 purposes. To empower youth and to empower communities" (7-10-09)

What I mean to say here is that there is a dual purpose to the work that buildOn does, which is to balance between the work of spreading education in a global sense community by community, but also to allow very specific youth who are involved with the program in the US to empower themselves through the Trek for Knowledge experience. I know that what I saw in the students who came on the trek at the end of the two weeks was students who were strong, and had been permanently changed by their experience, an experience that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

To the balance between the selfishness and imperialism of aid tourism and the benefit of the work of buildOn is something that I will continue to explore both in this blog and as I move into post-production on the documentary.