The award winning documentary screens at the Regent Showcase Theater at 4:00PM Fri, May 4th as part of the Awareness Film Festival.

The Mission of the Awareness Film Festival is to increase awareness of some of our world’s pressing issues; Ecological, Political, Health/Well Being and Scientific Progress. The festival showcases both Documentary and Narrative Features, as well as Short Films in venues throughout LA.

If you would like tickets for the screening please click here or visit the festival web site at http://awarenessfestival.healoneworld.com

The documentary won the ‘Best Artistic Response’ award this week as part of Climate Week 2012 celebrating the UK’s most innovative, effective, and ambitious environmental projects and organisations.  By celebrating the very best innovations, practices and leadership, the Awards aim to inspire more people and organisations to take crucial steps for tackling climate change.

Judges included activist Bianca Jagger, the Bishop of London Richard Chartres, the Prince of Wales’ environmental advisor Tony Juniper and the government’s chief climate scientist Sir Robert Watson.

Climate Week (12-18 March) is Britain’s biggest climate change campaign. In 2011 half a million people attended events. This year, over 2,300 events have already been registered across the country.

The documentary  beat off stiff competition from three other finalists in the Best Artistic Response category.  The Best Artistic Response category is given in association with H&M. Catarina Midby, Head of Fashion and Sustainability Communication at H&M, said: “We’re delighted to recognise this project with a deserved Climate Week Award. Drying for Freedom is a remarkable documentary that demonstrates how small, domestic, activity like how clothes are dried really can make a difference in tackling climate change. The topic has meaning for almost everyone, and goes beyond the issue of tumble-drying to deeper questions about how we live our lives.”

The Prime Minister, David Cameron said:

“I am extremely pleased to support Britain’s second Climate Week. When I gave my backing to the first Climate Week in 2011, we did not know what the level of participation would be and whether there would be appetite for joint action to help prevent and adapt to climate change. The response was huge. Half a million people attended over 3,000 events, making it Britain’s biggest ever environmental occasion and the country’s largest climate change campaign. Climate Week 2012 is expected to have even more impact.

Climate Week’s founder Kevin Steele said:

“The Climate Week Awards offer a vision of what a low-carbon society could look like, and that vision is being acted on by the hundreds of thousands of people taking part in Climate Week across Britain. Anyone running an activity for Climate Week can register it on our online map.”

For further information about the Climate Week Awards, visit climateweek.com/awards

The Eco Focus Film Festival are showing our film!  This will be the first public screening of the documentary on Saturday 31st March.

February/March 2012 has been and will continue to be a very important time for the documentary.  In fact the festival at the end of March will mark the three year anniversary of Drying For Freedom, from conception to delivery; it’s been a remarkable journey.

Making a feature length documentary is a fairly hard thing to do.  You spend years telling people about your ‘film’ yet you never have anything to show them; it’s either a concept or in pre-production, being shot, being edited, being graded, securing funding or securing rights.  So every day for the last three years, people have asked “How’s the film going?” and I have repeated the same answer for over a 1000 days, which is… “Yeah it’s going well, almost there”.  Now we are proud to be able to tell people where they can go to watch the movie. Don’t worry if you are not local to Athens, Georgia, over the next few months we will be putting the film out there wherever we can.

Also you might like to know that working on something for so long means extended periods of time without anybody saying ‘good job’ or confirming you are doing the right thing. In fact sometimes the silence would have been welcome, on the journey we’ve had to suffer constant rejection and even though, as the director, I’ve never lost faith in the film at times the faith has been precariously balanced.  So for the Eco Focus Film Festival to turn around and give us a big “YES”, well that’s all we’ve been waiting to hear all these years.  Here’s to more “YES” and less “NO” in 2012.  Three letters are certainly better than two.

So what does 1000 mean to us? Well six homes running a dryer for one year adds up to 1000 Kg’s of CO2 (more than 1 ton). You could dry 2000 t-shirts on a 1000 foot clothesline. (we aren’t suggesting you attempt this)

So while this neat little four digit number has different meaning to different people, to us it’s always going to be a big old figure. Whether it be 1000 fans, $1000 of donations, 1000 views of our film, 1000 Kg’s of Co2 (Carbon cost of running 6 dryers for a year) or even 1000 tons of the stuff (roughly 6000 tumble dryers running for a year). The second we begin to devalue numbers the easier it is for us to ignore the impact of important things.

We were ecstatic when the first ever fan clicked the like button on our Facebook page, we were over the moon when one person said they would stop tumble drying due to our influence. Seeing these two things happen in the 1000’s would be a monumental achievement. It’s taken us two years to reach 1000 likes, we have yet to realse Drying For Freedom so stay tuned for the new year. We hope to make a big difference with this film, both in how people think and how they choose to use energy.

In two years time? Let’s hope we are giving appreciation to the number 10,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000. Both in fan’s and supporters of a clean planet where clothes blow freely in the wind.

For those new to the concept, crowd funding is when you pool together all the supporters, fans, colleagues and generally anyone who wants to show their support for a project by donating money to help it along the way.

Now don’t worry this post isn’t aimed at your wallets, rather its a post that comes with some thanks. About 5 months ago we took a stab at crowd funding through the website indiegogo.com. We raised a small and tidy amount of $645. It was a little under our aim of the $25,000 we needed at the time to complete the documentary but nonetheless it was incredibly satisfying for us to see that somewhere out there people believe in what we are doing. Even without donations we are fully aware that there is a level of support worldwide that helps drive us to get this film where it needs to go. The money grabbing phase of the documentary is now over, so now what we need more than anything is support and help spreading the word of DRYING FOR FREEDOM.

So I just wanted to post a thank you to Anne, George, John, Jennifer and the 5 anonymous donations we received. As soon as we get to the screening stage of the doc we will press forward with the very perks we promised you for your kind donations.

Enough of that, enjoy our interactive video…
The Little Things

OUR FUTURE IS HANGING ON THE LINE!

Bournemouth based AUCB graduate film director Steven Lake will be previewing his debut environmental documentary in the Arts University College Bournemouth main lecture theatre on Friday 27th May, 2011, at 6:30 pm.

The preview screening is free to attend as the production team would like to invite the audience to provide some written feedback on the film at the end.  The feedback will then be used to finalize the film before its release later this year.  The film is produced by Bournemouth based award winning film production company White Lantern Film.

Steven, who lives in Bournemouth, graduated in 2009 from the BA Film Production degree at the AUCB and has been working on his documentary film DRYING FOR FREEDOM since.  Working alongside him is AUCB graduate Rob Fuller who graduated from BA Graphics and Animation in the same year and is completing all the documentaries key animations.

The screening coincides with the Big Green Fortnight which aims to engage the local community and raise awareness about our carbon foot print.  Steven’s film reveals the expense to the planet and financially of drying clothes electrically exploring the bans some communities have placed on outdoor clothes drying.

Whilst there is a worldwide focus on cutting carbon emissions, household are prevented from living environmentally conscious lives as outdoor clothes lines are banned by their community.  DRYING FOR FREEDOM reveals the story of our love affair with energy; the people who are campaigning against it, the rules society have created to sustain it and the destruction it is causing to the planet.  It explores how line drying is banned across the U.S. and how these communities are fighting for their right to dry naturally.  DRYING FOR FREEDOM also shows how corporate America sold its citizens the dream of electric bliss in the 1950’s. It investigates the argument that globalization, in countries like India, continues to promote the use of electric driers over clotheslines, signifying that our future is hanging on the line.

The film will be release later this year and the production need your support to help bring this important message to world.  You can follow the team on facebook, twitter and youtube and donate at Indiegogo.com or Kickstarter.com and receive a range of exclusive rewards including merchandise, personalized DVD’s and even dinner with the director.

The special free preview screening is open to anyone who is happy to share their thoughts on the film at the end.  To book a ticket, please contact Tim on 01202 297009 or email tickets@dryingforfreedom.com Tickets will also be available on the door.  For more information about the film please visit www.dryingforfreedom.com

White Lantern Film is part of the White Lantern Media Group, one of the UK’s leading digital media social enterprise groups based in Bournemouth. The vertically integrated group combines training, development, production, distribution and experiences within the screen and entertainment sectors.  With innovation and talent at the heart of the business, the group aims to become a leading supplier of screen and event based entertainment in the UK.

Recent surveys show almost half of the households in the UK own a dryer and that number is slowly rising.  At the moment the UK spends over £405M annually just running the dryer as well as releasing 6,412,500,000 Kg of co2 into the atmosphere a year. The rest of Europe is not that much better. Low estimates suggest that Europe is producing 74,600,000 tons of co2 a year just from electric clothes dryers!

The States however is way ahead of us in their dryer usage.  The USA is having a love affair with the electric clothes dryer, with approximately 79% of households owning a dryer.  America accounts for roughly 25% of the world’s energy consumption but can a small change like using the clothes line really help?

In the US, around 55,562,027 tons of co2 is released into the atmosphere each year directly due to electric clothes dryers, with some estimates suggesting it is costing US households around $12,000,000,000 a year in energy bills.

As energy consumption rises and the amount of coal, gas and oil is depleted, costs will continue to rise for the average household, it’s a basic supply and demand equation.  It must make sense to dry clothes naturally to save our own cash and help ensure that the environment is protected, after all, why pay to do something which is free!

Click the link below to see our calculations. This is a draft copy so its a little messy…
maths_and_data

By Tim Dare.

Day 6: Travel
Driving in an auto is a nerve racking experience in itself, more so when combined with standstill traffic, a flight to catch to New Dehli and a cameraman stuck somewhere near the airport.

Day 7: Improvisation

After an interview with Dr Pachauri at the TERI Institute was postponed at the last minute, an chance trip to the Indian Government offices lands us one of our most valuable contributors yet, Deepak Gupta the Secretary of the Ministry of Renewable Energy.

Day 8: Pachauri
A rescheduled appointment with Nobel Prize winner, Dr Pachauri added to the rush of everything since the start of the trip. It didn’t fully dawn on me that I was meeting him and his interesting perspective only sank in a few days later. I should’ve combed my hair that day.

Day 9: More Travel
On the flight back to Mumbai, I contemplate how the sterile airports are the only place in India that remind me of home. Everything else is worlds apart. I enjoy the flight playing hide and seek with a child sat in front of me.

Day 10: Dharavi
Visiting the slums of Dhavari, bursting with life and generosity. The people we passed welcomed us and offered us food and drinks, the thought of turning anything downs for fear of illness seemed insulting. I didn’t get ill once.

Day 11: Pune
Interviews outside of Pune gave us the chance to see a bit of rural India. We came to the conclusion that India has the most standard looking dogs imaginable – producer Dan takes the time to bond with one.

Day 12: Leaving
After an early start we were back on the plane but only after Dan’s massive production folder was officially declared a bag before he was allowed through security. It was that big.

The idea behind the 10.10 Global Day of Doing is to get organisations and individuals to commit to making measurable changes to reduce their carbon footprint. Each person that signs up commits to reducing their own emissions by 10% a year.

Over 100,000 people in 152 countries have signed up including some high profile faces such as actress Sienna Miller and designer Vivian Westwood.

Some suggestions on how to accomplish this include planning family menus before shopping to avoid food going to waste, choosing walking over driving and eating better quality meat but less of it.

The clothesline represents a very practical, easy way to make cuts and it even saves you money. You produce an average of 1kg of carbon each time you use your dryer, natural drying produces none.

10.10 provides an excellent opportunity to spend a day thinking about our lifestyle choices and committing to make small adjustments where we can. We will be looking at our offices, the way we go about our work and the things we can do as a team to contribute. We will of course continue to hang our threads out to dry and spread the word on clotheslines.

Add your name to the list here http://www.1010global.org/uk/join