Jack Healey is a long time Human Rights activist and ran Amnesty International in the '80s and put it forefront in the public mind. In 1988 I made an animated version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for him. It traveled with a big concert tour of Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Youssou N'Dour and Tracy Chapman.

Jack has been following the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma/Mayanmar for the last decade. In October 2007 the monks of Burma marched peacefully to protest the growing brutal military regime of Than Shwe. They were massacred in the streets by 10,000 soldiers. Jack wanted to show support globally in retaliation to this brutality. What we created were a mix of regular PSA's and several vignettes with actors demonstrating the real situations in Burma. It was a campaign that ran over the course of a month. The goal was to raise awareness of the situation in Burma and get people to sign up to show their support. We launched it May 1, 2008 and on May 3 an extremely violent cyclone hit Burma/Mayanmar. All of a sudden Burma/Mayanmar was on the front page of the news.

Here are a few:

Day 1: Will Ferrell did a straight ahead introduction for the campaign. It was important to set it up. Also since he was on a movie, his people didn’t want him to do any other possible distracting character. I love what he did.

 

Day 2: Jennifer Aniston agreed to direct Woody Harrelson and to our delighted surprise she showed up in the video as well. I so love the PA/AD who stars in this as well.

 

Day 3: Julie Benz asked her pals, Jason and Jenny to do a spot for us. We shot this in a 1934 old tire shop in the heart of Culver City.

 

Day 4: Sarah Silverman was able to bring to light the healthcare crisis in Burma in a poignant way. Johanna Stein is the scribe of this spot.

 

Day 7: This turned out to be one of the most powerful spots. Written by Johanna Stein and directed by Chad Einbinder whose idea it was to put the photos on the cards. Eric has been a long time supporter of Burma and it was a fun shoot done on the premises of Hollywood Center studios. One of our hotter shoots in the middle of April.

 

Day 8: Voices. Here is a great use of animation by writer/director Isaiah Seret. This took about 6 hours to animate.

 

Day 9: Smashing Fruit. Another favorite of mine by Isaiah Seret.

 

Day 12: This is a wall in East LA. I thought it was really important to do a piece that impacted our physical environment. I love that Jon Reiss used Aung San Suu Kyi’s voice. And I love the art.

 

Day 20: Ellen Page is such a natural actress. We were able to get her in and out in under 2 hours. She is a 2 take kind of gal. We shot this on the same day as Smashing Fruit.

 

Day 22: Felicity Huffman. This one focuses on censorship and came at the end of the shoot. The animated noise is covering up the director who steps in to annoy her and talk over her. It turned out much better than the one we originally wrote.

 

Day 24: This was our most controversial piece. Kim put the video up on her site before we released it. And it was during the cyclone so it caused quite a stir. On her site she got 250,000 hits in the 5 hours it was up and some really angry comments. The head of the U.S. Campaign for Burma was very upset, but as I see it, 250,000 more people were aware of the plight of Burma whether or not they were horrified by Kim’s piece or not. It doesn’t matter how you become aware..... It matters that you are now aware.

 

Day 25: I think Tim Bui is a genius director. Jack says you can never talk about torture, but I think Tim did a great job of conveying it, and communicating the terror of it without turning off the audience. 

 

Day 26. Joseph Fiennes wrote, directed and acted in this one. He gave this to us. This showed up from London one day, and I was just blown away by the high production value and the message of it. This one is stunning.

 

Day 27: Billy Ray wrote and directed this one and invited the talent to work with him. I was always so touched when people just came together to do these spots on their own time. I like this one because they hit on some new issues.

 

Day 30: Another spot by Tim Bui. I love Tila, the spot, the kids and we made the shoot all happen in one day. It was amazing.

 

Day 38: Norman Lear closed the campaign for us. I think he is a brilliant, brilliant writer and what he says is very powerful. It was one of the worst shoots of our entire campaign. It was raining, our teleprompter broke and we had to get another in from Burbank to Mandeville Canyon on a Friday afternoon of memorial day in the horrible weather. Norman was doing DVD commentary for Sony, and we got him a the end of a long shoot day, but he powered through.

 

I loved all of the spots and was incredibly lucky to be able to lead this cause.