Inside Disaster: Chronicling Recovery Efforts in Haiti

An upcoming documentary from Canada’s PTV Productions, which will be distributed worldwide by ITV Studios Global Entertainment, tracks the International Red Cross’s relief efforts in earthquake-stricken Haiti.

Twelve hours after the catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti on January 12, a six-member team from PTV Productions was at the airport, ready to head into the capitol of Port au Prince. "We were prepared," says Andrea Nemtin, a producer on the upcoming three-part production Inside Disaster.

Indeed, for the last year, PTV Productions has been working with filmmaker Nadine Pequeneza, who had conceived of Inside Disaster as a project that would chronicle the efforts of the International Red Cross’s Field Assessment and Coordination Team. "Our plan was to follow the Red Cross on the next international response, wherever it may be," Nemtin says.

With support from broadcasters TVO, Canal D, SCN and ACCESS, international distribution partner ITV Studios Global Entertainment, as well as the Canadian International Development Agency and Canadian Television Fund, PTV was able to mobilize quickly once news of the Haitian earthquake broke, dispatching a team that includes filmmaker Pequeneza and web producer Nicolas Jolliet.

The production crew will remain on site for another three weeks, Nemtin notes, with plans to return in five months to "follow up on some of the different stories they’ve been following."

While a broadcast date is not expected until next year, a website is already up and running at InsideDisaster.com. "This is our first truly multiplatform project," Nemtin says.

The comprehensive website features video footage, images and blogs by members of the production team. "We sent Nicolas [Jolliet, the web producer] down to Haiti with a satellite modem," says Katie McKenna, the Internet director at PTV Productions. "You can imagine him sitting on a hilltop waving this thing at the sky for 20 minutes every night waiting for a connection! He basically sends me something every night with a video that he’s gone out and shot that day, edited on Final Cut Pro on his laptop, a written blog post and a bunch of photos that he’s shot."

Another key element to the site, McKenna notes, is the geo-tagged map, where visitors can see images from a particular location. InsideDisaster.com has also taken advantage of a variety of social-networking tools. "We always designed the site so that the content would be able to live on its own on other platforms," McKenna says. "That’s why we decided to use YouTube instead of our own Flash players, that’s why we wanted to use Flickr instead of putting the photos up ourselves. We’ve licensed [the content] under a creative commons license, and invited people like Global Voices, the global reporting website, CTV News and Citytv [to use some of the footage]. Between these different platforms, we’ve reached over 100,000 people, if not more."

McKenna explains that the site is currently in its first phase; the second promises "a much broader look at humanitarian work." She is currently at work on a proposal for submission to the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund for further expansion of InsideDisaster.com, with elements that would include utilizing some of the footage that doesn’t make it into the three-hour documentary. McKenna says the idea is to deliver an "interactive experience" that would look at a natural disaster from a number of different angles. "We want to show how disasters are experienced in a multidimensional way—with citizens, aid workers, and the media all playing crucial, and interconnected roles. What we want to do is use real imagery and real stories and pull from the footage and use that to build an interactive experience that shows the kinds of decisions people have to make and how a decision made by a journalist could interfere or interact with one made by an aid worker. The idea is to do a really good job with the research and make sure that it has a feeling of truth that journalists, aid workers and people on the ground could look at this and say, Yes, that was the kind of thing that went on."