Standing Rock

PROJECT OVERVIEW

A remote, live, composite feed of ALL the various broadcasts coming out of Standing Rock including traditional news, independent news and citizen media.

WHAT WAS SPECIAL

When Standing Rock demonstrations and protests began to escalate in fall 2016, there were many live video feeds coming out of the area. Some were professionally produced by mainstream and independent news organizations, but most were just citizens on the ground going LIVE via facebook and youtube.

Accessing these feeds was paramount to getting the ‘whole picture’ of the events, but they were disparate, inconsistent and very hard to find and follow. Compelled by the events unfolding there, our team was getting organized to attend, but the Standing Rock leadership was requesting LESS people onsite, particularly non-indigeous community. If we were to contribute, we had to find a way to do so from afar.

Then it occurred – what if we could organize and mix all this mixed, diverse & inconsistent content and give people ONE comprehensive 24hr LIVE feed to follow?

We reached out to onsite journalists, freelancers and Standing Rock leadership and all were onside with our idea & offering. We took over the multimedia venue Sunset Labs in Victoria BC Canada, and for a week our team monitored almost 30 distinct channels and feeds and MIXED them into ONE composite feed. Whenever anyone would go LIVE on ANY of the channels we had discovered, we would mix to that channel and our viewers would instantly know what was happening. Additionally, each day we would capture the “best content” of the day, and create loops & playlists that we could share and RE-share if nobody was LIVE that we could follow at that time. What was special is that all this was accomplished remotely, delivering easily the most comprehensive information on the events – from over 1000 miles away.

TECHNICAL

This wasn’t actually a TECHNICALLY complex project, though it did require a ton of focus, equipment and long-distance coordination. We established 2 independent T100 internet connections in the remote venue we used in Victoria BC, Canada – 1 just to monitor all the inbound feeds from Standing Rock, the other to send our MIXED feed back out to the world. We had a long table with ALL the computers and ipads we had access to, each monitoring the various pages and peoples who were sharing the best content we could discover.

Many of these reporters, freelancers and water protectors we were able to connect with, and when possible they were informing us in advance of when they were going to go LIVE. On our main media server we had bookmarked all these various pages, and whenever our monitoring team heard or saw someone going live, the producer would bring up that page and we would mix over to it. This process involved unwavering attention to the many feeds we were monitoring, and quick minds by the whole team when a new source went live. One additional complexity was that the onsite militarized private security were using various signal scramblers, so often a great live feed would suddenly drop away and we would have secondary feeds we would need to change to on a moment’s notice. While we haven’t had cause to produce another event quite like this, it’s a formula and process that we look forward to activating again one day.

THE RESULT

In the week that we were LIVE (24/7) we were able to mix over 100 independent LIVE feeds into our remote composite broadcast, and also reshared over 300 various pieces of content from the news networks, alternative media and onsite reporters and citizens. A number of progressive websites and news sources such as Collective Evolution ended up running our broadcast on the homepage of their websites, helping us reach more than 20,000 concurrent viewers of our live feed. This composite approach to reporting on the event allowed us to provide a very detailed overview of what was happening onsite, and through MANY different perspectives and lenses including local law enforcement and government agencies who were offering LIVE broadcasts.

MEDIA

We didn’t produce ANY of our own media for this event, but rather were referencing and consistently re-sharing other people’s content. If you’re interested in learning more about Standing Rock, here are some of the sources we were following in the fall of 2016 that offered a great diversity of content through the height of the conflict between Water Protectors and DAPL: