Always in Season

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Images

Lynching Reenactments in Monroe, Georgia - 2009

Warren Read plants a sappling in memory of Duluth lynching victim, Elmer Jackson

James Cameron, narrowly escaped the fate of two men lynched in Marion, IN on Aug. 7, 1930

Thousands watch the Marion, IN lynching

Avatars on Always in Season Island

Always in Season Island - Interactivity via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook & more

The real Marion, IN courthouse square -1930

Our virtual world courthouse square

Budget

Raised to date: $26,000.00
Estimate to complete: $363,046.00
Total Estimated Budget: $389,046.00
The budget numbers above are accurate as of 05/20/2011

Status

Production

Media Type

Video

Project End Use

Other: TV, Virtual World Educational and Theatrical

Key Personnel

Jacqueline Olive
Director/Multimedia Producer/Writer

Jacqueline Olive is a multimedia producer, director, and writer who uses documentaries to tell nuanced stories of the people, places and cultures that make up our diverse world. Jacqueline worked at Independent Television Service (ITVS) for three seasons coordinating the production of the Emmy award-winning documentary series, Independent Lens, and the internationally-themed PBS series, Global Voices. In 2007, Jacqueline co-created the hour-long documentary film Black To Our Roots, which broadcast on PBS World.

Jacqueline has gained experience producing digital media projects that utilize a variety of web-based platforms to expand the reach of her films as a fellow with the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) New Media Institute and the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Producers Institute for New Media Technologies.

Currently a fellow with BAVC’s MediaMaker Fellows Program, Jacqueline is working with a team of innovative digital media developers to produce the virtual world project, Always in Season Island. This immersive, role-playing environment gives visitors the opportunity to intimately experience the choices and circumstances that brought tens of thousands of spectators out to participate in thousands of lynchings, while providing audiences with an interactive space to explore their personal and collective roles in fighting racism and hate today. For more information about Always in Season Island, please visit www.alwaysinseasonisland.com.

Before coming to documentary film, Jacqueline began working as a journalist in 2002 developing, filming, and editing news stories for an NBC affiliate. She lives happily in the San Francisco Bay Area creating documentary transmedia projects full-time.

S. Leo Chiang
Director of Photography
Born and raised in Taiwan, Leo immigrated to the US as a teenager and received a MFA in film production from University of Southern California before beginning his filmmaking career. In 1998, the Directors Guild of America commissioned Leo, then a film student, to direct and edit Directing: How to Get There, for which he documented early careers of several well-known directors including Robert Wise, Norman Jewison, and Steven Spielberg. His other films include To You Sweetheart, Aloha, about the 94-year-old ‘ukulele master Bill Tapia (PBS broadcast ’06, Audience Award at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival ‘05), One + One, a documentary about mixed HIV-status couples (CINE Golden Eagle Award ’02, Cable Positive Award ‘01), and Safe Journey, a short fiction film. He recently completed A Village Called Versailles, a documentary about the rebuilding and transformation of the Vietnamese American community in post-Katrina New Orleans. A Village Called Versailles will have its national PBS broadcast on the Independent Lens series in May of 2010. Leo also collaborates with other documentarians as an editor (True-Hearted Vixen, POV ’01; Recalling Orange County, PBS/VOCES ‘06) and as a cameraman (It’s STILL Elementary, ’09; Ask Not, Independent Lens ’09). Leo is an active member of New Day Films, the social-issue documentary distribution co-operative.

Michaelle Stikich
Editor
Michaelle Stikich has been editing since she commandeered the family camcorder and VCR and made her first music video at the tender age of 14. For almost a decade, she has worked as a professional editor in San Francisco for such clients as Google, Independent Television Service (ITVS), Filmsight Productions and many others. By day, Michaelle helps develop film editing software. By night, she is connected with the California Bay Area film community, working with local independent filmmakers and teaching video editing, as an Apple-certified trainer. Michaelle’s latest piece, "Gotta Go," for Victor Scott on SVC Records, has been accepted to the South by Southwest Film Festival and the Noise Pop FREEDM Films Festival.

Outreach/Engagement Plan(s)

Our plans with Always in Season are for communities across the U.S. to begin to engage in cross-racial dialogues about the impact of local lynchings and use our television broadcast, education modules, screenings, panel discussions, DVDs and machinima (videos in or about a virtual world) series, to strategize steps for reconciliation and restorative justice that are appropriate to their needs.

To engage youth and others who might not be drawn to a television broadcast, we are also using virtual reality. Among other virtual world platforms, Always in Season Island will exist in the immersive, interactive world of Second Life (SL). More than seven hundred universities around the world teach courses or conduct research in SL, and our SIM (or locale) will offer an innovative opportunity for millions of current SL users and novices to gain an experiential sense of the national scope of the practice of lynching in an unparalleled media rich environment.

While lynching is a painful part of American history, much can be gained by carefully uncovering lessons lost to denial and misinformation. For this reason, we will use the facts of the events of the August 7, 1930 lynching in Marion, Indiana to recreate the social climate that contributed to the choices and circumstances that brought more than 10,000 men, women and children out in this small heartland town to watch the lynching of Abram Smith, Thomas Shipp, and the 16-yr. old who narrowly escaped, James Cameron.

Visitors will comfortably move through our SIM with host avatars as they tour the town, assume the role of key people involved in the events of the Marion lynching (like the sheriff who was present, the victims, mob leaders and children in the crowd), complete tasks and respond to prompts from autobots in the growing mob that determine the outcome of the virtual lynching, interact in reflection areas to gain a deeper understanding of the national scope of the violence and the impact of their behavior on the events at the courthouse square, attend meetups with the film's main characters and academic scholars, join virtual classrooms, screen films in the theatre, interact with multimedia displays and share their experiences with others in SL and the real world on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. By taking part in these events in Marion, our goal is to give visitors an opportunity to put themselves in the shoes of everyone involved and learn ways they can prevent violence and fight racism and hate today.

Thanks to the resources and support provided in June, 2010 by the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Producers Institute for New Media Technologies our development team has produced a prototype. With organizational partners like BAVC, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (NCCHR, owners of the Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America exhibit), Chicken & Egg Pictures and the Catapult Film Fund, we are ready to begin production on the project at Hampton University (HU) in partnership with students and a multidisciplinary faculty team. At HU, the SIM will be developed in three stages over two years. This facilitated environment will launch to hundreds of thousands of educators and students around the world after the first year, and once tested and refined, it will open to the general public at the same time NCCHR launches and the Without Sanctuary exhibit opens at its permanent home in Atlanta, Georgia.

As an integrated approach to distribution, we are planning to market our film with this virtual world project. We plan to drive virtual world audiences to our documentary with screenings of our film in Second Life and other virtual world platforms, in-world discussions lead by the scholars and authors on our advisory board, and appearances by our film’s characters on Always in Season Island, while promoting the virtual world project at film festivals and screenings, with webtags on the film, a machinima series for broadcast, and recent innovations in blue ray technology that will appear as enhancements on the DVDs. After broadcast, we also plan to distribute our documentary to individuals and groups in virtual world theatres.

For more information about our development team, advisory board, engagement partners and more, please visit www.alwaysinseasonisland.com.

Funders

Name	Amount	Date
Catapult Film Fund	$15,000.00	01/01/2011
Chicken & Egg Pictures	$10,000.00	07/25/2010
The Puffin Foundation	$1,000.00	05/01/2010

Location

1474 University Avenue, #80
Berkeley, CA, 94702

See Google Maps

Short Synopsis

With film and virtual reality, Always in Season takes an integrated transmedia approach to telling the story of the lingering impact of almost a century of lynching African Americans until the mid-1960s. Our documentary feature highlights the emotional journeys of relatives of the victims, perpetrators and spectators who are turning harm to hope with grassroots efforts towards reconciliation and restorative justice, and our virtual world locale, Always in Season Island, extends the film’s message by giving audiences an experiential look at the social climate that made this form of racial terrorism possible.

Description/Treatment

Background: For almost a century until the mid-1960s, tens of thousands of men, women and children attended the lynchings of more than 4,000 African Americans that often included torture, mutilation and photography. With advertisements, excursion trains reserved for out-of-towners and notes from parents excusing their children from school to attend—this form of racial violence was at times highly organized and occurred in every state across the U.S. but four for reasons as arbitrary as sheer boredom. Lynching was akin to the sport of hunting, and blacks were “always in season.”

Treatment: Unlike other films on the subject, our documentary feature called Always in Season ties the facts of this recent history to current grassroots efforts towards reconciliation and restorative justice, encouraging viewers to consider where their own family stories intersect with this difficult chapter in American history. Always in Season uses the stories of relatives of lynching victims, spectators and perpetrators and the collection of photographs and postcards of the victims called Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America to examine the lingering impact on blacks, whites and others in 3 very different communities in Minnesota, Missouri and Georgia still dealing with the fallout of these seminal events.

At a time when discussions of the racial divide in the U.S. are too often reduced to sound bites or shouting matches, Always in Season presents the emotional journeys of ordinary people coming together in the face of difficult dialogues to remember the victims, repair the damage of lynchings in their own communities and fight racism and hate.

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice."_ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'm often asked why I would make a film about such a difficult subject. And, my best answer right now is that like each one of us, history is filled with darkness and light. What intrinsic subtleties about ourselves would we miss if we only choose to see the light?

I learned about the Without Sanctuary exhibit after returning to live in my hometown in Mississippi in 1998. This collection of photographs and postcards shows thousands of men, women and children posing with the bodies of lynching victims who look like my relatives, friends and neighbors. In fact, the white spectators in the pictures could also be my friends and neighbors, and this need to understand the perspectives of everyone involved in lynchings and the residue that is passed down through generations is what has led me to spend the past 3 years with those images researching and developing the film.

I have been horrified by the scope of the violence, surprised by the choices and circumstances that brought people out to watch, and moved by the courage and dignity of many of the victims and heroes involved. Since beginning production in March 2011, I am tremendously inspired as I document the stories of ordinary people around the country who are challenging the veil of silence around the facts of this history and finding answers in their families and communities to the questions “What does lynching have to do with me?” and inevitably, "How can I help heal the damage?”

NOTE: to view an online clip of the 15 minute Always in Season work-in-progress, please email Jacqueline Olive at: jackie@tellitmedia.org.

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