It’s early morning and you’re walking through the dirty streets of a small village in the rural countryside of China. The air is thick with a heavy, putrid smell that nearly makes you gag with every breath.  As you round a corner you are stopped in your tracks by the sight of huge, smoldering mounds of burning electronic waste – discarded cell phones, computers, VCRs, televisions. Thick, toxic plumes of black smoke rise from the burning piles like a scene from a post-apocalyptic horror film.

It’s difficult to breathe and your eyes burn from the acidic atmosphere, but the people on the street don’t seem affected. As you raise your Sony handycam to start shooting footage of this disturbing scene, an elderly woman nervously scurries out of sight, yelling in Chinese and pointing at your camera while she shakes her head, “No!” Others seem equally alarmed at the sight of your camera, and you get the feeling no one wants this toxic disaster caught on tape. All the more reason to hide the camera and keep rolling, while suspicious police officers watch your every move. Through an interpreter, you ask local kids, their parents and friends about the piles of burning debris and why they continue to work in such a dangerous environment. It becomes painfully clear they don’t really have a choice.

Their answers are more disturbing then the scene itself. It seems an industry has sprung-up in the poorer countryside of China, where electronic waste from the entire Western world is dumped and disassembled, then valuable parts and heavy metals are extracted and the remains are then burned. You can hardly believe what you are seeing in the camera’s viewfinder as small children scale massive mounds of toxic computer waste to scavenge for anything that can be melted down and sold. They risk their lives and those of future generations to put food on the family’s table.

When you return to your hotel room and begin editing the unbelievable and disturbing footage on your laptop, it becomes clear that this is a story that needs to be told, and one that no news network in the free world is telling.

Enter CurrentTV.
On Thursday, October 25 representatives from Current TV, the two-year old independent cable/satellite network founded by former vice-president, Al Gore and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Joel Hyatt, joined Expression College President and Creative Director, Spencer Nilsen for a three-hour panel discussion on the new station and how creative individuals can get involved in producing original content for the various programs. The Current TV guests included David Nguyen, VCAM Coordinator, Saskia Wilson-Brown, Manager VC2 Outreach, and Cory Bolt, Technical Director and Expression College alum.  Together they gave the enthusiastic audience an in-depth look inside the workings of this unique, next-generation television network and focused on how programs are conceived, produced, and distributed on the station.

The panel explained that there are currently three types of programs on the network: VC2 (non-fiction, Viewer Created Content); VCAM (Viewer Created Ad Messages or commercials); and series programs produced in-house.  Most of the program segments are under 10-minutes in length, but the panel members indicated that more long-form programs are currently in development.  Right now a full 1/3 of all shows on the network are viewer created.

VC2 (pronounced Vee-Cee Squared) shows are the most common format of program, produced entirely by viewers who then upload the shows to the Current website where visitors can vote for their favorite programs.  Shows that receive the most votes are then elevated to broadcast status, and will run on the network for up to several weeks.  At that point, the creators are paid a fee based on a sliding scale.

Expression College has had a longstanding relationship with CurrentTV since it’s early existence, and is one of a handful of learning institutions that have tailored their curriculum to meet the criterion of Current programming.  And so far the changes have been well received by students in the LMW (Living in a Media World) course, resulting in five student created programs being elevated to broadcast status on the network (see story elsewhere in this newsletter).

Current’s Technical director, Cory Bolt is a former Expression student and was once the college’s equipment room manager. Cory assured the student audience that the skills they are learning in their programs will serve them well when producing content for the real world. Off-the-shelf technology like cheap video cameras, fast computers, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Garageband, and Logic Pro, and software like the Adobe Suite of applications all combine to give students a big head-start in the production industries.  He confirmed that Current’s producers use the very same technology everyday to produce their programs, so graduates integrate smoothly into the production environment.

For more information about CurrentTV or to get information about how to produce content for the network, please visit www.current.com.