One Day on Earth

One Day in Los Angeles is a community-based, one-day filmmaking event in which participants across L.A. will document the challenges and hopes of our local communities. Participants will film during a 24-hour period with the goal of raising the level of community engagement in L.A., and inspiring action towards a better city by 2050. The resulting media will be made available to the public through a geo-tagged archive and video map of Los Angeles.

In a region divided by mountains, freeways, economic barriers, and municipal boundaries, many of us identify more strongly with our own neighborhoods than with sprawling and fragmented L.A. County. This relationship can manifest as a deep sense of neighborhood pride, but can also take the form of ostracism along poverty lines and language barriers. One Day in Los Angeles will tell stories of the neighborhoods that make up our region, and in doing so expose the challenges and human potential of a large and diverse community.

The 24-hour media-creation event will take place across Los Angeles County, and will feature filmmakers, local charities, city policymakers, community organizations, and student groups filming stories emblematic of the particular struggles and hopes of their communities. In the process, we will create a video dialogue crossing the cultural and economic barriers that inhibit social connectedness, and inspire volunteerism towards enhancing human development in Los Angeles by the year 2050.

The event will be organized by One Day on Earth, an L.A.-based nonprofit organization with experience coordinating cause-based media creation events on a global scale. The project will culminate with the release of a geo-tagged video archive featuring all media captured during the event. The technology platform will be based on software developed by One Day on Earth for our annual global collaboration: https://vimeo.com/18910284

One Day in Los Angeles participants are welcome to film any subject matter. The only parameters are, a) all filming takes place within Los Angeles County, b) all filming takes place during the one-day event, and c) the motivation behind filming is for L.A. to become an even better place to live by the year 2050.

To ensure diverse participation, the One Day in Los Angeles staff will reach out to local schools, charities, policymakers, and inspired citizens to join the project’s social networking platform, www.onedayonearth.org. Onedayonearth.org currently hosts a community of over 35,000 participants representing every country in the world, with over 1200 in L.A. County alone. All prospective participants will be given access to the educational toolkit which was developed to train students of all ages in the use of digital filmmaking technologies

(http://www.onedayonearth.org/page/education-1.) The toolkit is currently in use in over 70 countries around the world, and has been invaluable to empowering high-level participation from individuals with access only to camera phones or consumer-grade video cameras.

Beyond educational support, project producers will reach out to prominent issue-based filmmakers within the region to serve as localized producers, ensuring that there is comprehensive coverage across all regions of the city, and across all key indicators set forth by the LA 2050 initiative.

One Day in Los Angeles will impact the Social Connectedness indicator by providing an opportunity for region-wide social engagement; generating media that will inspire volunteerism; creating accessible media through the interactive online video archive; and forming a framework for local filmmakers to collectively produce an inclusive view of the current state of human development in Los Angeles.

While One Day in Los Angeles primarily affects the Social Connectedness indicator, we believe that this is not an insular category. By creating a dialogue between Angelinos communities, the project’s residual effects could potentially cover all indicators listed by this initiative. A socially connected L.A. will allow citizens to collaborate on shaping their own future and engaging in activities that will most impact the region’s improvement.

To inspire specifically directed participation we will put forth the following call to action:

If you had one day to document what Los Angeles needs to change by 2050, what would you show us? Tell the story. Take action. Be heard.