Video Library Project.

Beyondtv.org is a website, a video library and a collective doing Film and caberet nights on Environmental and Social Justice themes.

We use short videos, music and the art of having a laugh to inspire people to work towards selfautonomy and environmental sustainability. We have just completed a tour of the North West. It was really sucessful. We ran workshops to show potential media activists how to encode video and put it on to CD format.

The aim of the tour was to begin work creating an alternative network of Video distribution for Social Justice screeners and low cost distribution in general. As the tour progressed it became clear that there was a need for a distributed Digital Video Library.

Project Proposal:

The proposal is to create a Digital Video Library for short films suitable for screening at the Video nights that have been popping up around the country.

In Manchester we already have 18 CD's full of Ruffcuts Undercurrents material. And 14 cds of the European Indymedia Newsreal and lots more of global material as well.

The archive is not restricted to pure social justice material. We encourage contributions of Music, spoken words and all conscious material that will work well at public events.

We will send out a call for more work and then create a digital archive of this material that we can copy and give to Social centres and Indymedia collectives.
Users can then check the Web for content they want and can be directed to their nearest Archive.
There will be a search facility so if groups contact the hosts and ask for material on a partcular subject, eg, refugee issues, climate change, you can search the archive of films on the hard drive and suggestions are made.

The material will be distributed under the copy left licence which is viewable here.
http://creativecommons.org/license/

We plan to have a first version of the Video Archive up and running by
October in time for the European Social Forum.
How it will work:
Technical:
We will encode these to VCD compatible format [Mpeg1-pal]and put them on the harddrive - If you can already encode to VCD [pal] format then even better!
Making it Happen:
We will offer training on how to encode Video to Mpeg1 - and do an international call out to Video collectives to send us video to add to this CopyLeft resource.
We will send out Cd updates.
Costs:
Our costs will be buying 10 or so harddrives [depending on interest from social centers and Imc Collectives] collating the information, entering the data and providing some travel costs for interested collectives.
Contributors:
If you have material you would like to include. Please send a mini dv tape, dvd or vhs of the material you would like to contribute along with descriptions and contact details of the collectives.

Beyondtv / Manchester Indymedia, c/o Manchester Must Social Centre, Basement, 24 Lever St, Manchester.