Do you know where that cookie's been? - UPDATE

UPDATE: This video got BoingBoing'ed after I forwarded it to Xeni Jardin, who posted some excellent animated AIDS PSAs from France. BoingBoing is the widest-read blog and easily the most addictive, and it was cool to hear the reverberations of the post as friends saw it in the Midwest and West Coast. The video has settled down now to about 12,000 views.
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I'm happy to share a PSA I produced last month for Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, DC. Serendipitously meeting with a friend last fall gave me the chance to pitch them my services, and that landed my first documentary job out of grad school, a fundraising doc that aired to about 1,000 people at the Washington Hilton. Working with them made me marvel that "Planned Parenthood" is a dirty word in conservative circles. They do nothing but help people and provide affordable medical services.

This project came from a grant to produce a PSA regarding HIV awareness, and the grant deadline was April. The project was wide open, so I took a page from the sex ed and made a graphic illustration of it. The music is Leadbelly's "Keep Your Hands Off Her", which I think fits quite nicely.

A buddy of mine says he's never eating a frosted sugar cookie again.





To see more of the kids I worked with on both projects, check out this interactive story from the Washington Post, and click on the "Fatherless" story in the table of contents. Read more about Planned Parenthood at www.ppmw.org.

Video PSA from the Frozen Foods. Go Vote.

Video redundancy for my blog readers:




Party peoples of the democratic republic of America,

Get out and "vote" today.

Get out and score some "ballot ass", as they say in West Virginia. Go get you a piece of hot hanging chad, or talk smut to a Diebold voting machine before it switches your vote to Republican. Seriously, go bag some electoral tail. I don't care who you vote for, just get out and "know" this election in the Biblical sense. And make your voice heard with a "climactic" change of leadership.

See, I live in the District of Columbia, and we don't have "representation" in Congress. I don't have a Congressman; I don't have a Senator. So we 600,000 citizens of the nation's capital don't get the same hot Congressional action that you all do. Oh, we get taxed, to be sure. And we see all your tawdry ads, and we get hot thinking about the macaca gaffe and whatnot, but we can't go to the voting booth to land the same sweet punchcard poon in the way you can.

I can't demand of my Senator why we've spent $500 billion in Iraq to build democracy when the citizens of our nation's capital don't have democracy. And in a similar way I can't urge my Congressman not to have sex with teenage boys.

Oh, I'm going to vote today, and I'll get that little sticker that lets everyone know that I had my way with the American electoral process. But as a resident of DC, not a vote I cast today can change the balance of Congressional support for the administration that says "no doi" to waterboarding. For the leadership that says, cut taxes for top 5%, and triple the national debt. Or for the White House that says, "I never said that".

Never in our lives has a change in leadership been such a mandate. Voting is imperative today. So go get you some civic booty.