On Monday 10 June a packed Frontline Cub witnessed a revolution in documentary-making as the One For Ten team presented their ground-breaking, crowdfunded online documentary series on death row exonerees.
Co-directors Will Francome, Mark Pizzey and producer Laura Shacham described how they set off on a road trip across the US to make ‘live’, interactive online shorts that would be shot, edited and uploaded from their RV in one day. Also on the panel, award-winning executive producer Christopher Hird took the audience through what made this project exceptional, both in its content and the way it was created.
The films feature death row victims who had been declared innocent and freed. They include the story of Joe D’Ambrosio who spent 20 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and Sabrina Butler who was put on death row for the murder of her baby, after she performed CPR to try and revive him.
The documentaries reveal a catalogue of failures in the US Justice system including mis-identification, racism, poor public defense and false confessions under duress.
Pizzey explained how the idea for the series was born when they began research and discovered a compelling narrative around the death penalty in the US. He said:
“We came across this crazy statistic that since America reintroduced the death penalty in 1976, for every ten people that have been executed, one person has been found innocent and released off of death row.”
Hird added that the idea “ticked all the boxes” for him:
“It was never going to get any money from broadcasters, but it was really important.”
The project kicked off with a social media campaign. Francome said:
“We were really interested in trying something new and fresh and…to allow people to feel that they were part of the process.”
Shacham added that the outreach aspect of the documentary included live tweeting during the interviews and posing their online audience’s questions to the interviewees. They made transcripts available on their blog of all the answers that did not make it into the films. She said:
“What we really wanted was debate and conversation and I think we were pretty successful with that.”
The challenges of filming and editing within tight time constraints were also discussed. Francome said:
“Now, watching them back it’s so weird to hear someone taking about this story and to see the B-roll of them knocking about their house.”
But an audience member commented that seeing the characters in their kitchen making coffee “normalises” them and reminds viewers that “they were just normal people going about their lives and then ended up in this horrific situation.”
Hird added that the simplicity of the films worked effectively in creating the live, raw feeling that was intended:
“What this is also an extraordinary tribute to, is the capacity to cast a film without having met the people beforehand.”
All the films can be viewed online on www.oneforten.com, where you can also find transcriptions of all the interviews they conducted, find out more about the death penalty in the United States and stay up to date on any future plans.
The death penalty was re-instated in the United States in 1976. Since then, for every ten people that have been executed, one person has been released from death row after spending an average of ten years in isolation. One For Ten is an online documentary series telling the stories of these innocent people.
This crowd-funded series is being made live on the road; shot in one day, edited the next, and uploaded overnight. The team is spending five weeks travelling from New York City to Las Vegas, releasing two films a week. In the process the filmmakers rely on their online community to provide interview questions, music, artwork and to share the films online in order to reach a wide audience.
Fresh from the road, we will welcome co-directors Will Francome and Mark Pizzey, producer Laura Shacham and executive producer Christopher Hird to present a selection of their short documentaries. This will be followed by a discussion on the pros and cons of creating short web-documentaries, online distribution and crowd-funding. They will share their strategies for building online communities and grass-roots marketing. We will be looking at how much input they received from their online community, and to what extent it helped shape the result.
Directed by William Francome and Mark Pizzey
Produced by Megan Garner and Laura Shacham
Year: 2013
Between the Lines was a three-day festival that took place at Rich Mix from 1 to 3 March. In a series of follow up events we continue to explore the challenges facing documentary makers, investigative journalists and citizen reporters in the new media landscape.
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