PhilanthroPEAK Live starts at 5pm tonight, Saturday March 20th, 2010 at the Diana Wortham Theatre in Asheville! Film, Music, Art, Mon-profits, and more… Read more about it n the Blue Banner Article below:
Charity promotes nonprofits with film
By Alex Hammond / Staff Writer
UNCA’s Blue Banner www.thebluebanner.net
rahammon@unca.edu
The PhilanthroPEAK Live concert at the Diana Wortham Theatre involves several bands, cameras, a cut rate for students and filming a unique documentary.
“This year, Chris’ idea originally was to develop a film that would show us building relationships in the community, as we’re trying to develop a program in Asheville,” said Kaleem Clarkson, the director of Concepts4Charity.
C4C is a national charity dedicated to the promotion of other charities. Their next production is the PhilanthroPEAK documentary, which deals largely with area nonprofit organizaitions and the artists and musicians involved with them, said Chris Gaspar, the vice president of operations of C4C.
“We’re like a PR company for nonprofits,” he said.
Asheville has a lot of nonprofits, but little in terms of promotion for them, Gaspar said. Filming a documentary on those organizations seemed like a perfect chance to build relationships and to promote an area that gets less media coverage than it should, he said.
“I thought that this place is not really getting covered,” Gaspar said. “We want to introduce Asheville to a larger base.”
Gaspar wants to build another office here, Clarkson said, so they started production and started raising funds to move a pilot program from Massachusetts to the mountains.
“He (Gaspar) felt that it was time to build a physical presence in Asheville. Most of our physical presence has been in Massachusetts and Sacramento,” Clarkson said.
Funds raised at the concert Saturday will go toward a program starting at Asheville High School named Hip-Hop Culture, Gaspar said.
“We basically pick a benefactor, we work with the local talent and the local venues,” Gaspar said.
Clarkson said the program offers several disciplines, including break dancing, poetry or songwriting.
“What we do with Hip-Hop Culture, plain and simple, is we provide kids the chance to select a discipline. They practice that discipline twice a week after school,” Clarkson said.
Students learn the history of hip-hop as well as the techniques. At the end of the semester, they participate in a talent show, according to Clarkson.
“We got the confirmation from the principal that we could start a pilot program,” he said.
One of the filmmakers involved with the PhilanthroPEAK project, David Bourne, is a local who worked with Gaspar on a prior project, A Call to Action. He said the documentary is well on the way to finishing shooting.
“We’re still in production, so we are probably about three-quarters of the way through the project. We’ve filmed in a cabin in Leicester and we have filmed in a hot-air balloon,” Bourne said. “In my balloon, I was interviewing a naturalist who works for a regional nonprofit called the WNC Alliance, and he was able to talk about the region’s biodiversity.”
The unique shooting situation caused some equally unique problems, Bourne said.
“The major challenge was doing an interview when the balloon had to be inflated at different intervals. The balloon blast would go off, and we would just have to have them repeat the last thing they said, just start over,” he said.
Filming in a balloon was a way the filmmakers offered a different take on the area, Bourne said.
“Of course, being up in a balloon you get all kinds of perspective that you can’t get on the ground,” he said.
Read the rest of the article here: http://www.thebluebanner.net/mobile/charity-promotes-nonprofits-with-film-1.1270081
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