Our Production Facilities & Needs

by admin on Sunday, 7 February, 2010

For intersex to gain human rights and patient-centred medical treatment, we must tell our stories to the world in the most effective ways possible.

THANKS to the kindness of a corporate benefactor who shall remain anonymous, we already have the core of the multimedia production system that we need to create projects telling our own stories – intersex people talking about ourselves in our own way.

We are no longer forced to rely on non-intersex people to do it for us, interpreting the facts as they wish, spinning our lives to their own ends.

Now we can speak to the world with our own words and images, in our own voices, for our own purposes.

Why multimedia?

MULTIMEDIA has long proven far more effective in helping create positive change than simply writing or speaking on behalf of change.

Stories told through multimedia are more personal, informative, engaging and entertaining.

Even better, they can show our fellow citizens that we are normal people with normal hopes and dreams, who want to live normal lives and that our difference is nothing to fear.

Some of our members are professional communicators working in the media and have skills and experience that they are now putting into practice on all our behalf as intersex people – this website is an example of that.

We have the knowledge to produce all kinds of media products of the highest professional quality. We just need the means to do so – the hardware, software and consumables – and to pay for our ongoing overheads.

Already at work

WE have already started creating the following media projects for distribution through this website and by other means:

Audio interviews – for publication as podcasts and transcripts.
Brochures, guides and reports – at the moment we rely on them being available as downloadable PDFs on this page, but we are redesigning our existing material and creating new ones with extra information.
Documentary films, videos and viral shorts – for television broadcast and for digital distribution online and via DVD.
Emails and newsletters – to inform our members, partners, interested professionals and members of parliament of our aims, needs and achievements as they happen.
Photographs and photo-essays – for exhibition and publication in all available media and venues. Two of our members are current or former professional magazine photographers.
Posters, banners and placards – we take part in public rallies and other events and posters are excellent for getting our message across.
Training materials – we do presentations and offer training to business, the public service, medical personnel and services, and health and human rights organizations such as NGOs and not-for-profits. We develop training course materials and need to design and print them.

Will you help us by donating?

OUR current production system, thanks to our benefactor, is a wonderful beginning, but it needs some extras to bring it up to a fully professional capacity.

Just so you know where we are starting off from, here is what we have at the moment:

Digital audio recorder and microphones.
Digital stills cameras.
High definition video camera and tripod.
Multimedia production computer, monitor, software and scanner/printer.

Here is what we need:

Colorimeter – producing multimedia and photographs demands that your work is correctly colour-balanced for broadcast and reproduction. If it is not, it is rejected. Our monitors need to be balanced to display correct colour at least once a month. This colorimeter is what we need to do that.
External hard drives – there is nothing sadder than creating a wonderful multimedia project without backing all of your files up and then finding the originals have been corrupted in some way. What is lost may never be found again. External hard drives like this, this or this will automatically back-up our projects so that if anything goes wrong we will have at least one copy of everything ready to retrieve with a mouse click.
Internal hard drives – multimedia project files, high resolution digital stills and video, audio recordings and sound effects, graphics, video and sound samples all eat up enormous amounts of storage space. We are already short of internal hard drive space and have found we urgently need one or more of these.
RAM – multimedia production is memory-intensive and although our production machine came well-equipped to begin with, we have discovered that contemporary production software gobbles up RAM (random-access memory). We have some empty slots for memory cards and need to add as much extra RAM as we can, like this.
Various – there may be other major items to add to this list after we do an exact audit of our current production gear and our future production needs.

Here are our ongoing overheads:

Internet access & web hosting – this website and related projects are hosted on a commercial web hosting service that incurs annual fees.
Phone – we need to be contactable at all times wherever we are, via mobile, land line or broadband VoIP phones.
Printing – brochures and flyers are still effective ways of getting the facts about intersex out amongst the public. We need business cards and stationery in order to be a credible, professional organization.
Recording, storage and back-up media – all our projects including this website should be regularly backed up onto removable media such as data DVDs and stored off-site while digital stills and video are recorded onto cards and tapes. Each project incurs costs for these consumables.
Skype – for the lowest-priced calls computer-to-computer and computer-to-phone. Skype-to-Skype calls from computer to computer are free, but Skype computer to landline telephone calls incur a small charge per minute and it adds up.