Plan C: Make Better Now (Video): How 100,000 Volunteers Made Millions of PPE

Maker News
Plan C: Make Better Now (Video): How 100,000 Volunteers Made Millions of PPE
If you want to get a sense of all the makers around the world producing PPE over the last several months, watch this video that captures the spirit and spread of these efforts.  How makers have collaborated on solutions and produced PPE in local communities is a big story, one that deserves its own documentary someday. Maybe this is a good first step.

The video was written and directed by Tessa Byford along with Tobias Demi of Prodigium Pictures. “Tobias immigrated from Austria, I was adopted from Peru, and the second partner at Prodigium, Hiroki Kamada, is from Japan,” Tessa wrote in email.  “So even though we work in LA, our team has a very international background. I believe that drove the vision of the video.” Tobias kindly answered a few questions about the production.

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and the team behind the video?
We’re part of Prodigium Pictures, a social impact production company in Los Angeles. We produce films and videos that help people better understand the world and foster critical thought. Tessa and myself got involved into OSMS in late March of 2020 in the quest to do something useful during COVID. I focused on keeping track of the global Maker-made PPE tally while Tessa focused her energies on making this video.
We’re both film producers by trade, and spent the last 6 months of 2019 living in a remote farming village in Peru, which taught us a lot about how people all around the world have so much in common.

When Tessa came up with her vision for this video, representation was of primary importance for her. The individual clips were 90% shot by people in far-away places, many of them taking valuable time out of their PPE production days to film what they were doing. We credited all contributing organizations on the www.makebetternow.com website, which also serves as a platform for non-makers to discover efforts in their area and support them.

How did you track down so many different efforts in different countries?
There’s a spreadsheet with more than 100 different people from 20+ countries that we interacted with. We were already part of lots of Facebook Groups when Tessa envisioned this video, and the OSMS local response team (headed by Sabrina Merlo) helped tremendously with finding groups around the globe since OSMS was already actively tracking hundreds of them in 50+ countries.

We spent 2.5 months on making the video, the majority of which was spent on communicating with individual people around the world (we used lots of Google Translate!) and ensuring we would get a true representation of the incredibly diverse maker responses out there – both in terms of people and in terms of technology.

Here’s a little map of the people we talked to and the countries they came from (light grey = unused submissions, green = footage we used)

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Do you think this video will lead to a longer video project?  
We’ve talked about turning this into a feature-length documentary, especially since we have so much footage already. That project is in an early planning phase and we’re looking into funding options for it; our goal would be to tell individual stories makers in 6 continents and how they dealt with the crisis. There’s an incredible wealth of serendipity in these stories, many of which we heard as part of this research process, so it’s certainly worth a feature-length project if we can get it off the ground.

Is there anything else we should know about the project?

This was a true labor of love with enormous challenges. We couldn’t have done it without the amazing makers we met along the way.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

View more articles by Dale Dougherty

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