We are excited to announce that the DIYdoc app is now available in the iOS app store. For almost a year, we have been working to develop and launch a crowdsourced filmmaking app called DIYdoc. The mission of the app is to enable companies and organizations to tell high quality, branded, user generated stories about their causes or initiatives. The power of cameras in smartphones is increasing exponentially with every new model, and we feel the applications of this cloud-based tech for user-generated testimonials, product reviews, or even how-to videos are numerous. Our app ultimately, enables large numbers of people to tell high quality stories and deliver powerful messages with their smartphones at a cost less than that of a single commercial.
David Grandison Jr. conceptualized the project with John Carlin of Red+Hot Org. He led instructional design, IA, and product management (in conjunction with Paper and Equator for UX, design and development). The app works by providing a template that scaffolds a user through the most important steps needed to create the scenes in a short film. We help users understand and execute the most important steps in filmmaking, like shooting an establishing shot, framing shots and interviewing. We ultimately enable anyone with a smartphone to create compelling scenes that are part of an organized story arc. Once the user finishes shooting their scenes, their film is then uploaded edited in the cloud where logos graphics and other transitions are added automatically, and then, within minutes a completed film is returned to the user in the app and via email, where it can be shared via social media. Our app evolves user generated video creation from impromptu rants on Facebook Live, Snapchat, Instagram or Periscope, to a time when users are able to provide brands and organizations with well thought out, authentic stories that reach the goals of the sponsor organization or brand. This tool ultimately facilitates the creation of compelling user-generated stories.
The app can be replicated as a white labeled tool and deployed for any organization whose team members or constituents have important stories to tell. We have currently created and launched 2 versions of the app. One for Advocates for Youth and their “1 in 3” campaign which was designed to help their team’s activists create videos that educate users on reproductive rights. And another version has been created for Alicia Key’s We Are Here Movement. We designed this version to empower refugees, activists, and people living with HIV to tell their stories.
Our partners at Alicia Key’s We Are Here Movement; Keep A Child Alive Foundation and Red+Hot Organization, are helping us to develop this new technology to enable activists at their partner clinics, and victims of the global refugee crisis, to make high quality, branded films using inexpensive smartphone-based tech. Our launch comes after many months of Beta testing abroad, helping these organizations to provide lifesaving messages.
All of our templates are created by professional Directors or Producers like myself. The We Are Here version of the app, features a template by Jonathan Olinger, a filmmaker who directed Let Me In, a music video/short film that draws attention to the struggles of refugees, with the help of the music and lyrics of Alicia Key’s. Jonathan’s template, “I am a Refugee”, is user generated transmedia component of this video. It is enabling the voices of refugees to be documented and captured by the organization for use in their promotional media.
We created another template called, “I Am So Much More than HIV” for another WE Are Here Movement partner organization called, Keep A Child Alive, to help spread the important lifesaving message of how to live successfully with HIV. We coupled these templates with several other templates, “I Am An Activist” that enables activists to tell their stories. And finally, we created a template called “Silly Selfie” to enable kids in orphanages sponsored by Alicia Keys, to have fun with an app and tell their own more visual stories.
David traveled to Kampala, Uganda with several leaders from Keep a Child Alive in August (2016), to train, and deploy, and Beta test the app in one of the most technologically challenged and underserved parts of the world. Our activist and beta testers were flown in from Rwanda, Durban, Kigali and several other cities in India, by our sponsors Keep A Child Alive and Red+Hot Org. Our team gave activists and organization leaders (pictured above) iPod Touch devices loaded with the app and offered them a week long project-based Digital Storytelling Workshop. The goal for this deployment was to train-the-trainer and enable activists, many of whom are successfully living with the HIV virus, to use our app to document the powerful stories of other activists, and HIV survivors who visit their clinics regularly for free medication. We hoped to help them document what is working and changing lives at their clinics, so that it can be shared via social media to empower others and spread the word about their cause. We successfully deployed the private beta of our app for activists to use and make films to tell their own stories to a global audience. Since the Beta launch hundreds of films have been made to spread important lifesaving messages in the developing world.
In Sub Saharan, Africa and India, AIDS is still taking millions of lives due to stigmas around HIV testing and seeking treatment. Many people in these underserved regions, still think HIV is a death sentence, when it has actually been relegated to a chronic illness by medical advances in more developed parts of the world. Simply visiting a clinic in many parts of Africa and India can cause those seeking help or life saving medication to become victims of discrimination and sometimes violence. DIYdoc is helping to break the stigmas around HIV using inexpensive, smartphone-based storytelling. We hope to democratize filmmaking and challenge activists living with HIV to make and share films about those who are successfully living with HIV in their communities.
Here are a few films that were created by these activists using DIYdoc:
As a part of Alicia Key’s We Are Here Movement we are trying to reboot the world, with social innovation and we want to thank her for her visionary leadership and funding. Here are a few of the other partner organizations that we owe special thanks; Red+Hot Organization, Fame Currency, Keep A Child Alive, Care, Bobby Bear, War Child and OxFam.
Please DOWNLOAD DIYDOCfrom the iOS app store, give it a try and share a review…We would love your feedback!