We appreciate NYTimes' Lens for recognizing our collaborative work with Tim Matsui and Leaving the Life. On the heels of working with the documentary film, American Promise, we are honored for the opportunity to work on the issue of domestic minor sex trafficking with Tim.
Wanting to look beyond the typical audience, he turned to Laura Lo Forti and her husband, Andrew DeVigal, whose company, A Fourth Act, focuses on helping photographers and filmmakers interact with audiences more deeply in order to affect the issues they care about.
In the Lens post, we urged filmmakers that making and distributing the film aren't enough.
Making your story and releasing it is only half of the work. The other half of the work is to engage with an audience and capture the needs of a community to spark change.
and
Mr. DeVigal and Ms. Lo Forti are not looking for large crowds, but for the people who are most involved with an issue and those in position to spur change. Through documentaries and moderated conversations, they seek to turn stakeholders into problems solvers. To accomplish this they started up a web-based mobile app, Harv.is, which captures audience feedback in real time and creates data visualizations to facilitate conversations.
If there's a story you want to tell that builds on community, we want to hear from you.