There is one thing I would modify: I would have liked it even more if it had touched my feelings more. Naturally, sharing information is essential, but I think emotional impact greatly enhances engagement and motivation. In fact, I consider it indispensable.

The emotional experience that I DID have while viewing the film was often lovely … the calm clarity and composure of some of the speakers was admirable. It’s heartening to see that such composure can be a part of addressing huge challenges.

But the presentation that got me involved in my local Transition Town had a brightness to it. A very engaging woman gave a talk with a well-crafted PowerPoint presentation. She was warm and cheerful and lively, and she expressed a wonderful confidence in the TT approach, partly because of the proven principles of Permaculture, and partly because of the many wise, sweet, and savvy design features of the TT vision. When I listened to her, I was powerfully engaged and motivated, and soon thereafter, I became a
founding member of our local Initiating Group.

Another example of media outreach that I find emotionally strong is this wonderful slideshow-with-music, “Transition Towns New Zealand”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APMTXrIL48A

I hope these comments are useful, and I thank you again for your important work in support of the Transition Towns movement.

We watched the film as part of our transition town invercargill (NZ) meeting and we really liked it. Looking through the comments it seems like a lot of the ground has been covered by others but here are our comments:

We liked the music-video style presentation of facts at the beginning but thought it just needed to be a little slower. Also better techno music if possible.

A little shorter would be good. Maybe 45 minutes?

Diversity – this has been covered by others and perhaps the ‘white middle class’ impression may be unavoidable given the membership of the group & film you had

The ‘cute kid’ alienated some people in our group – but others loved him so it shows you cant please everyone

We liked the people looking back from the future.

Obviously we loved all the NZ coverage but understand if this needs to be cut down!

Overall we thought it was a great job and we look forward to being able to show people the finished version.

Firstly, thank you to the film makers and other transition people who put this together and published it for this feedback opportunity. Seems rather rare to have an input and to have more ownership over the forthcoming film, but also an appropriate process for the transition movement.

Also like to acknowledge the other unique aspect which is the “open source” film making experience. From my past dabblings in film making i can appreciate how challenging it must be to work with footage from varying sources. One suggestion i might make if you would like to even out the geographical representation would be to use the old ‘ken burns effect’ stills with audio stories from those areas (assuming they exist, in podcasts perhaps?).

I screened this film to friends and a family a few times so some of their comments have come through below. All were impressed, a friend of mine was just walking by then he was glued to a seat for the rest of the film.

Ahh what a nice opening, the young+old characters are a good tool and the intertwining sentences which follow is just beautifully done.

Some disagreements:
* i think many of the early comments re: cult elements aren’t to be worried about
* i do not believe that “converting the masses” should be a focus of this film – rather to nourish the curious potential transitioner and provide unity to growing transition communities scattered around.

Some quick agreements:
* 45 mins a good upper limit
* editor james re:cultish vs suits !!
* paula kovacs comments..
* news scenes too ‘loose’, can be tightened up in relevance and duration
* perfect amount of gloom (ie, very little)

a couple other things:
* my folks were able to understand the peak oil section so i think its fine, nice succinct coverage, with that good ole heinberg voice over. future generations of music producers will sample the guy for sure..
* apart from the natural UK beginnings, there is perhaps too strong an NZ representation unless you want to show that theres a huge movement there (i dont know if there is or isnt..)
* perhaps just a little too much of the cute kid? his pauses tend to reveal a scripted undertone after hearing him multiple times..

Just a few technical things: quicktime ?? please consider a more common player next time, the strange waiting times, temperamental playing and all the QT interlacing was prob not worth it. Something like bliptv or vimeo might be worth looking into.. and wordpress just started a nice video publishing tool. Also my film maker friend suggests changing the scrolling texts to still titles..

Thanks again to all involved for your efforts and engaging the community in this dialogue.

warm regards,

Dylan Prins, Marrickville, Sydney AUS

The real way to know whether it speaks to your target audience is to run some focus-group-type screenings and get feedback. If for those not-acquainted with Transition but aware of the problems – I think their feedback would be crucial, particularly for Transitioners who want to educate/recruit.

I miss a good concise introduction of what Transition is at the outset, after the problems are laid out. Jennifer Gray did that in our Peak Moment Conversation “The Transition Movement Comes to America” (www.peakmoment.tv/conversations/?p=254), and it is a good base from which to then show all the examples of Transition in action.

The narrative arc is somewhat discontinuous. The film begins midway in the twenty-first century, with the elders looking back and the children remembering. Did I miss a narrative link saying something like, “here’s some of the early projects”? It would seem the backcasting device could’ve been used more fully, since it opens and closes the film.

Overall, I think it meets your objective, Emma, quite well: it celebrates Transition and documents its early phase. With a spirit and tone that is upbeat and positive, just like Transition aims for.

I hope for more robust examples of education in future.

For an earlier commenter about nothing taped in North America in the film – we invite you (and all Transition folk) to view Peak Moment Conversations with groups and individuals working on the transition, whether they call it relocalization, sustainability, building local communities, permaculture, Transition, or just doing the right thing. Most of our programs were taped on the west coast US & Canada; we hope to tape elsewhere in the continent in future and welcome contacts and ideas. About 150 episodes up on http://www.peakmoment.tv.

For the commenters concerned about class, race, gender: most of our guests too are white middle class (which I plan to expand from), but sociology professor Rowan Wolfe does a good job of raising issues for the broader society (“Social Effects of Peak Oil”, episode 69).

Janaia Donaldson (host/producer)

All media is representation – there cannot be an absolute truth in a piece of TV – its a ridiculous idea. Manipulation is inherent in the medium due to editing. In Transition’s simple collection of stories, soft measured tone, lack of overarching narrative (it doesn’t try to ‘tell’ you anything) is us deliberately attempting to make the presentation as neutral-as-possible. However I can understand why some found this approach irritating.

The film is the result of a thoughtful sift through tens of hours of footage, with a selection process based on showing a good ‘general mix’ of projects, depending on what was sent in. Is ‘In Transition’ truly representative of the gender/class/ethnic balance of the movement ? On a global level probably not, but for the UK, it probably is. For a single mum on benefits, or a struggling family in a highrise, buying local organic food is a joke, but if we had ‘positively discriminated’ a different ethnic/class balance in the film wouldn’t that have been worse ?

A group shutting eyes and visualising a better future ‘cultish’ ? If the people involved had been wearing suits would this sequence have elicited the same response ? It would seem to me very sad if the more spiritual side of the movement, personal transition, needed to be airbrushed out just because it makes a few people uneasy.

In retrospect I think the lesson learnt is that it’s an impossible task to make a transition film. A diverse cross cultural international movement probably just can’t be represented by a single piece of media. Maybe In Transition 2.0 should be an interactive pool of small stories contributed from around the world, where the viewer can create their own film, dynamically strung together via a few clicks on a web interface. In this way, transition media could sidestep representation, and become culturally and socially relevant to each viewer, whatever their background or location.

The theme that the film needs to appeal to different types of people seems to repeat itself throughout the posts. I wonder if someone looked at any research done in that area. This would inform the film producers and they would construct the message in the film to do exactly that.

I’m not an expert but I’ve stumbled over two approaches recently and would love to see someone with a better understanding of those things comment on the film through their lens.

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I’ve found a valuable website http://www.campaignstrategy.org and http://www.cultdyn.co.uk and their model describing how our values underpin our decisions. They basically map society on the base of their values and explain how one has to communicate with people in various groups to affect change.

This presentation gives a very good visual explanation to the model and shows examples of strategies for climate change campaigns to reach to people with diverse sets of values http://www.campaignstrategy.org/articles/int_values_campaign.pdf The article http://www.campaignstrategy.org/articles/VBCOP_unifying_strategy_model.pdf shows a practical application of the model while the http://www.cultdyn.co.uk website and newsletters on http://www.campaignstrategy.org explain the theory behind it.
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Fourcultures This theory is a bit different from the above but again suggests that there are four cultures within society. http://fourcultures.com/