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Due to our organisation’s global outlook I tried my best to talk to as many people as possible and attend every specialist meeting on the initial Monday/ Tuesday! However for the many I didn’t get the pleasure to meet here is a brief idea of what the Brock initiative is about and what films we are trying to produce in regards to turtles.

The Brock Initiative <http://www.brockinitiative.org/> is a soon to be charity and part of Living Planet Productions, a wildlife conservation film company, executive producer Richard Brock. Richard worked in the BBC Natural History Unit for 35 years producing, among others, the highly successful Life on Earth and Living Planet series. Concerned by the lack of willingness to address the real current state of the environment he left the BBC and started his own independent production company Living Planet Productions.

Living Planet Productions has made over 100 films on a wide range of environmental topics, shown all over the world. As his longarchive of films and footage mounted up, Richard felt that there was something more that could be done with this resource. He decided to set up The Brock Initiative, to recycle his archive of footage, and to ask others to do the same, to create new programs not made for a general TV audience, but made for those who are really connected to the situation in hand: local communities, decision makers, tourists, government officials, even that one fisherman who uses dynamite fishing over that one coral reef. It’s about reaching those who have a direct impact; reaching those who can make the difference.

The Brock Initiative has vast amounts of turtle footage and access to turtle footage globally, the good news, the bad news covering many countries and oceans. This footage is presently gathering dust and should be put to good use to help in the conservation of the turtle.

We are offering this footage to you for free, to work with you and your organisations to make films that you think could make a difference. The target audience may be governmental officials to aid in passing laws, schools, villages, tourists. The material we have can be edited and re edited into different formats and languages plus added to fresh material to target a variety of different audiences that could make the difference needed. Film is a very strong medium and can be a very powerful tool in aiding conservational issues.

We are also appealing for additional footage that you may have and would like to share to build up our stock library. Any special behavior or action you may have caught on camera and would like to see it be put to good use. I have to stress that this footage does not have to be an award winning, photographic masterpiece as much of our work is not for broadcast, it’s about a message and spreading a message as far and wide as possible. So if you have something special that you would like to contribute to aid turtle conservation, please get in touch and let me know what you have.

However, having said all that, in focus would be preferable! We would like to see that the dark greenish moving blob was actually a turtle!

For those of you who attended the symposium, you may have seen at the poster session we are also researching the use of a networking wall map. The map of the globe is designed to be atheistically pleasing with the purpose of identifying different turtle species in certain areas with the affiliated organisations contact details on the back of the map. This would be a very accessible at a glance reference to use, with the added use of a calendar!

We had very positive feedback on the map with most finding it a useful tool to have. Due to the extent of the people involved with turtles it will be a hard task to put everyone that may want to be on the map onto the map so it may have to be segmented into different maps. As this map is still work in progress please let us know your comments and suggestions which we will gratefully take all into consideration.

If you have ideas for possible films, projects and would like to discuss them further then please don’t hesitate to get in contact and I’ll be happy to see how we can work with you and your organisation. Or if you have footage you would like to share, comments on the map we are working on, I would love to hear from you to! For more information on The Brock Initiative please visit our website <http://www.brockinitiative.org/>.