Duncan Putney, a Providence man who earns a living as a filmmaker, actor and writer, was talking to a friend who worked at Big Sisters of Rhode Island about two years ago when the discussion turned to how financially strapped nonprofits can be.
“We were chatting about Big Sisters and all the great stuff they do and how underfunded they are,” Putney recalled. “She mentioned how the agency cannot even afford to have a public service announcement made to let more people know about it.”
Putney then came up with what he called the “neat idea” of having a contest for local filmmakers to see who could come up with the best PSAs for nonprofits after just seven days of production. He is a member of the advisory board of the Rhode Island International Film Festival, which immediately agreed to sponsor the competition.
“I was thinking that there are so many filmmakers out there and there are all kinds of filmmaking contests that are timed,” Putney told Providence Business News. “Seven days is plenty of time to turn out a professional, broadcast-quality PSA piece.”
Last year, separate contests were held in Providence, Boston and Maine. This year, to further expand, “we are talking to other cities like New York and Dallas,” Putney said, to see if independent filmmaking groups [in those places] want to mount their own competitions.
The Providence competition in 2010 saw seven teams take part, with an average of 10 people on each filmmaking team.
This year’s registration deadline was March 4, with production taking place between March 30 and April 9.
Each team must create separate versions of the PSA, running 20 seconds, 30 seconds and 60 seconds each. The PSA must be informative, Putney noted, and not simply a request for money. The main idea – a real challenge for filmmakers, he said – is to capture the essence of the nonprofit simply and quickly. “What’s that one feeling, that one emotion, you want to get across?” he said.
Last year’s winner was a team from New Hampshire, Smoky Quartz, which produced a PSA for Big Sisters. “I can’t even begin to tell you how helpful it was,” Deborah Saunders, executive director of Big Sisters of Rhode Island, said of the brief spot that features girls happily playing the clapping game together.
The PSA is posted on the agency’s website, on its Facebook page and is being used for training purposes and other special presentations, Saunders said. She noted that the agency this year began working with boys, as well as girls, and she hopes that this year’s competition will result in a new PSA aimed at boys in need of big sisters.
Michael Udris said he and his brother had made PSAs for entities such as the R.I. Department of Education, so when they heard about Putney’s contest “it seemed like a great fit for us.” The two grew up in Massachusetts and have lived in Providence since the late 1980s. They are Brown University graduates with a filmmaking studio on Washington Street on the West Side.
Entitled “Look at Me – I’m Like Everybody Else,” the Sensational Child PSA directly addresses the stigma of autism. It shows about 10 or 15 adults and children on screen talking informally to the camera about the ailment, Udris said, leaving the viewer confronted with the perplexing question of who has autism and who does not. He described the seven days of production as “a whirlwind.”
The Udris brothers will take part in this year’s competition, Michael Udris told PBN last week.
After the March 4 registration deadline, Putney said the contest this year will involve the same number of individuals and teams as last year. Putney has more requests from nonprofits than he can handle. “We really need filmmakers,” he said. “How many nonprofits we can help depends on the number of filmmakers we have.”
The contest is open to all filmmakers,”Putney said, “students, independents, professionals, amateurs.”
The top Boston winner last year was a team of graduate students from Boston University, he noted.
Ideally, Putney likes to see four teams assigned to each nonprofit so the agency can have a choice of PSAs. Each agency can use the PSA it likes the best for promotional purposes, even if the PSA it chooses is not designated as a winner.
The PSA winners are aired on local television stations throughout the year, which this year will include Cox Communications, WJAR-TV NBC 10 and WLWC-TV Channel 28. Winners also are entered into contests for New England Emmy awards and Hatch awards, Putney noted. •
No posts to display
Sign in
Welcome! Log into your account
Forgot your password? Get help
Privacy Policy
Password recovery
Recover your password
A password will be e-mailed to you.
