Some of you may know what we’re up to and some of you may have no idea but you’ve been told to check us out. Or maybe you’ve just stumbled upon us by mistake! Either way, here’s a little bit about what we’re doing and what we’re trying to achieve!
Well, for starters, November 11 this year gives us a date of 11/11/11 – a once in a hundred years occurrence, so we’d thought we’d recognise the occasion like never before! Who knows how they’ll celebrate it in 2111, but we’re all pretty sure we won’t have the opportunity to find out.
So what are we asking of people then? As soon as the clocks in your country tick over to midnight on 11/11/11, you are free to unleash your creativity for all 24 hours of the day! If you have access to a film/video/digital camera, mobile phone, microphone, internet, or anything else that you record on and upload onto a computer, then you are invited to take part in the biggest creative project of our human history! We are asking anyONE and everyONE to take part! There are 196 countries in the world (and thousands of languages) and ideally we’d like submissions from ALL of them, although we know some may be more tricky than others – but we WILL get them :-)
On this day, we want you to film, photograph, record some music, capture sounds, or blog/Tweet. For more information on what you can do, check out our Participate page. It’ll give you much clearer information! Now when we have all your submissions, which will have to be uploaded by November 22 (we’ll give you 11 days to do it, seeing as it’s a good number for us), we will then go about the long process of creating a number of awesome pieces of work. These will include a WORLD MUSIC COLLECTION that we will create from all the songs that we receive. I say we, we will be leaving the music side of things to our very trusty Executive Music Producer, Imogen Heap, as she knows a little bit more about these things than we do! From the photography submissions, we will be creating a PHOTO BOOK that will bring together the most fantastic shots from around the world and will also include many of the blogs and Tweets that are submitted on the day! And the big one, with all of the film and sound entries that we receive, we will be creating a 2 HOUR DOCUMENTARY that will show how the world lived on 11/11/11! The sounds that you submit (be it the birds singing that wake you up in the morning, or the traffic rushing past your office) will be used in creating the score for the film, which Ms Heap will be taking care of too! Now this is going to take us a while to put together – we will be having to deal with thousands of submissions, and we don’t want any of them to be missed out in the judging process – so as a thank you present for being patient and waiting for your work to be make it to the big screen, we’ll be holding FREE screenings around the world on September 21, 2012. And we’re not restricting ourselves to cinemas, we’ll hold them anywhere. If you want to hold one, and you can guarantee that you can get 100 viewers and you have suitable equipment (i.e. a screen and speakers), we’ll send you a copy of the finished film so you can put on a screening – university or town hall, a park or art gallery, it doesn’t matter, we’d love for you to hold one! Once the worldwide screenings have been held, we will be making the film available for purchase as a DVD or via digital download (iTunes, a Netflix and the such!).
Hopefully we’ll make plenty of money from this! Not that we’re going to keep any of it. The 11Eleven Project is ENTIRELY not-for-profit! All of the revenue from the sales of our products will be split evenly among our chosen charities which are:
SAVE THE CHILDREN
THE HUNGER PROJECT
WWF
OPPORTUNITY INTERNATIONAL
GLOBAL VOICES
HAMLIN FISTULA
These have been chosen extremely carefully by us as we had to make sure that they will be spending your money wisely, and we know for a fact that they will be!
You may be asking, WHY are we doing this? Well it’s quite simple really. We want to plant a seed of compassion in the world and allow people all over the planet to gain a perspective of this crazy rock that we all live on. Are people from different parts of the world really that different? Different cultures may have different traditions, but we’re pretty sure a teacher in Madagascar is trying to achieve the same as a teacher in the USA, or a Muslim father wants the same for his children as a Jewish father! We want this to be used as a time capsule for people to look back on and see how the world was in 2011. We’re looking for truthful stories from people around the globe that will give us a clear idea of how it is to live where you do, something that news channels or other programmes miss out on. But we’re not giving you a totally blank canvas to work with (apparently that’s a bit daunting for some), rather we’re giving you 11 topics to help you with your creativity. Now don’t think these are here to restrict you, they’re merely guidelines that you can interpret in any way you see fit! For more information on the 11 topics click here
Now you know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, you have no excuse to not get involved. We don’t want this to be a chore, we want you to have fun doing it, so get your friends and family involved! And if you’ve already got an event planned, make sure you capture it! At the end of the day, everyone has a story to tell – what may seem boring to you, may seem ridiculously interesting to someone else! So get out there on 11/11/11 and help us realise that we’re not all that different after all. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!
