Cheerleader Claire

“This is Claire. I met her in Salamanca Spain. As you can imagine, I changed my flightplan to spend another couple of days with her. She’s a cheerleader from Auburn, Alabama.

This is her slightly overweight cousin who posted the following comment on Claire’s facebook page:

“You still talking to that Joran Van Der Sloot guy? (you KNOW who I mean!!!) ignore him!”

Apparently this girl thought me to be very scary.

This is an example of negative spinoff. Personally, I’ve also had a very positive spinoff on the whole Van Der Sloot thing I want to discuss with you today.

An empty canvas

A beer coaster is good for three things:

-       keeping the bar dry

-       advertising

-       solving the problems of the world

See, that last thing is what we do constantly. All of us. Unwinding, we suddenly know how to resolve world peace, bring back the polar ice or stop the Mexican flu. And we write that down on a coaster.

In February last year, Peter R. de Vries drew half a confession from Joran Van der Sloot concerning that horrible history with Natalee Holloway. Two things struck me as offensive and led to the following video:

It’s in Dutch, obviously, but you get the idea. We were commercialising a hype. Me and three friends issued out press releases to the national media and got picked up by:

Dagblad De Pers

NOS Headlines

3 FM

Kink FM

Journaal op 3

Quote

Geenstijl.nl

and numerous other blogs.

The viral forwarded people to a  website where people could order the bracelets. We had 500.000 visitors in two days. Reactions varied from:

FUCKERS! I wanna hang them on the highest tree!

to:

I want two dozen bracelets, please.

After two days, still riding the publicity wave surrounding Van der Sloot, we issued this video:

All of this cost us  a phone card, a tape,  a lotta calls, fake bracelets, a webdomain and the like. Roughly 280 euros. We did it in two days.

I wanted to show this to you guys because we combined entrepreneurial (be it buzzed) spirits, our creative merits and our time into an effort that had no revenues, but, at least to us, major social relevance. And I see this too little in the Dutch film and television world.

I have realized that to produce social relevant things you need critical mass. Here at TEDx Amsterdam, I want to call upon my fellow writers, my fellow filmmakers and, not unimportantly,  our government- who is arguably the only film and television producer in the Netherlands- to put social relevance back in our cinematic work. Artists help shape our history, our cultural heritage. Stimulate that. And fellow creators: don’t walk away from your responsibility.

To quote Liam Gallagher shouting on stage to a girl in the crowd trying to get her to pull her top off: “It’s no’ a fokking’ard”.

Just enjoy it while you do it.

Cheerleader Claire

Thank you.”

Notes or remarks? Please leave a comment!

Wil je weten waarom ik dit heb geschreven? kijk dan Hier of Hier.