Three guys, a video camera, and a Mac can change the world. In 2003, Jason Russell, Laren Poole, and Bobby Bailey bought a camera on eBay, jumped on a plane bound for central Africa, and began filming. They were risking it all to put a face on some of the most gut-wrenching atrocities the world has ever seen. They were heading into the heart of northern Uganda to find a few kids who had, at one time, been part of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
“We fell upon this story never knowing that it existed and we felt an enormous amount of pressure to get over there and document it and show it to the western world,” says Russell.
The small outfit produced one of the most successful films about the children of Uganda that’s ever been made and formed an international nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering peace in the region. The trio christened both the film and the group Invisible Children. Since then, the group has gathered an international staff, raised millions, promoted peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan government, and deployed aid workers in Uganda. The trio has spoken at countless schools across the country, visited Congress, and helped organize one of the largest U.S. peace protests in recent years.
Invisible Children is one of the fastest-growing nonprofits on the planet — and it’s built around Mac computers. The group cranks out biweekly podcasts to keep members up to date on the latest projects, produces high-definition videos to wow government officials and potential investors, and has a website loaded with downloadable content that helps spread the message. It manages every aspect of its business — including accounting, correspondence, and constructing and managing databases — using Apple computers. It’s a new high-tech approach to fundraising and it has been a smash success.
“If you’re going to change the world, you have to think outside the box,” says Russell. “You have to challenge the rules and laugh at the status quo. The Mac speaks to the creative spirit and the mind. It allows you to imagine what you want to do and allows you to accomplish it.”
Changing Lives
Russell and Bailey studied film at the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California (USC). They could have focused on cranking out movies, music videos, sitcoms, commercials, or promos in major studios. Likewise, Poole, a University of California, San Diego (UCSD) structural engineering student, could have used his talents to pursue a more mainstream career in, say, bridge building. But the trio wanted to do something different. “Our work is potentially going to liberate thousands, even millions of people, and that excited us to no end,” says Russell. “It was an opportunity to create a film that will change people’s lives. It’s the idea of Americans waking up to their influence and having an effect on the rest of the developing world.”
Russell, Poole, and Bailey decided to use their greatest strength: storytelling. In Uganda, they found four young boys who were tangled in the web of war and retribution. “These people live in a devastatingly traumatic circumstance,” says Russell. “The kids were playing games, singing, laughing, and running around, just like we used to. That made the connection so strong for us and we did the only thing we knew how to do: We befriended them and got to know their story so it would translate to the American kids here.”
That translation turned out to be pretty straightforward. Despite living in a war-ravaged world, Boni, Tony, Jacob, and Thomas bore a striking resemblance to American kids. They loved hip-hop, sports, teasing each other, and movies. They were funny, smart, and charismatic. The short film, Invisible Children: Rough Cut, gave the western world a close-up, personal view of the crisis in Uganda. And it was so successful that the trio decided to expand their efforts and form a full-fledged nonprofit.
Video Gallery
Commanding Attention
When you’re as busy as the crew at Invisible Children, information can get lost in the noise. Email messages are quickly buried in mountains of correspondence. A chat window, however, is hard to ignore. “I made everyone get on iChat,” says Travis Russell. “The instant communication that it provides, along with video chatting, brings us together as an organization. And in the future, we plan to use iChat to present videos and projects to audiences. iChat plays a huge part in our organization.”
Self Serve
As an organization, Invisible Children has thousands of hours worth of footage to store, edit, and retrieve. In the past year, they’ve filled a seven-terabyte RAID. To meet their massive storage needs, they built an Xserve RAID system linked together via gigabit Ethernet. “I had no networking knowledge, but I’ve got our system to work really well,” says Travis Russell. “It’s been pretty amazing, considering that we have five workstations networked.” The video team is also able to use cluster processing to crunch big rendering jobs while they sleep. “Renders that used to take a whole weekend now take one night. We come back in the next morning and we have four different versions ready for distribution.”
