Since 2007.Purple States produces video that distills the experience of ordinary people for a variety of platforms and purposes. We combine amateur authenticity with professional production and editing to create powerful, watchable stories.
Value
Purple States video adds exceptional value whenever it is useful or illuminating to convey how regular people actually think, feel, act, respond, live.
Politics and policy: To reveal what’s at stake for ordinary people by capturing a range of perspectives in a single actual or virtual space, to supplement reporting by major news organizations. (Primaries '08)
The human face of economic life: To show how regular people make a living, pursue their dreams, stay above water, use products or services, produce ideas or stuff. (Learn to Earn?)
Organizational impact: To convey how institutional or corporate initiatives reverberate on the ground. What do the experiences of ordinary people reveal about a challenge or the approach to solving it? (Five Years Left)
Engaging the people formerly known as the audience: To give viewers of online or television content a chance to share their responses in a dynamic, watchable form.
Platforms and Partners
Behind the Scenes
Methods- Careful selection of real people with characteristics appropriate to the programming -- not the usual suspects or the most vocal web-natives
- Systematic deployment of the selected individuals to enable them to convey their experiences and concerns
- Self-filming: with a small HD camera and guidance, ordinary people with no prior experience convey their experiences in an intimate, concise and visually compelling way.
- Professional filming: a film crew documents an ordinary person’s encounters when it is important to capture the responses of more than one person simultaneously
- Professional editing transforms raw footage into a coherent narrative.
- Professionally shot documentary-style video featuring an unscripted 'cast' of ordinary people (Election ’08)
- Professionally directed and edited video crafted from self-filmed footage submitted by people we recruit, train, and manage (The Farmers’ Film)
- Tailored combinations of self-and-professionally filmed footage that exploit the distinctive virtues of each (Degrees of Difficulty)
To enable a diverse mix of ordinary people to participate, and to honor the amount of time it takes for them to work with us to capture their stories, we offer participants in Purple States productions some compensation for their effort, ranging from $50 for the 50/50/50 bloggers who did a few hours of self-filming to $500 for the students in Degrees of Difficulty who were asked to self-film over 6 weeks and to spend a week on a shoot in Washington to $7500 plus travel expenses for the citizens who spent approximately 500 hours covering the 2008 primaries on location and from home. We cover travel expenses as necessary. Where appropriate, we give participants a small HD camera.
PURPLE STATES LLC IS AN INDEPENDENT MEDIA COMPANY REGISTERED IN CT.