ET Video – Shaping the Images that Shape the Issues
ET Video Productions
Over the years, ET has been a prolific producer of video productions, for educational and advocacy use.
These have ranged from award-winning documentaries, to special outreach events, to hard-hitting campaign videos which changed the world.
In the coming months, many of these productions will be added her on an ongoing basis, either in their entirety or in excerpts. The ET video archives are extensive, and include many images and events recorded nowhere else.
If you think that effective video production is a good way to help change the world, think about getting involved with ET’s video productions going forward.
Educational outreach on Whales
ET has been privileged to play a role in getting people to better know whales through a number of productions narrated by Lloyd Bridges, our longtime friend and the international spokesman for the ET whale campaign.
The educational documentary WhaleSong, featuring Lloyd, won the gold award at the Houston Film Festival and was seen by millions of people.
Lloyd returned with a cast of other celebrities for “To touch a dolphin, To save a whale”, an educational production which was extensively broadcast in north and south america to rally support for whale and dolphin conservation. In addition to Lloyd, this production featured video calls to action by Wayne Gretzky, Elle McPherson, Kenny Loggins, Peter Horton, Lynne Moody, Rodney A. Grant, Matt Frewer and others.
Environmental Documentaries
Often, ET has been in a position to document things that others couldn’t. This can lead to documentary spin-offs through working with independent producers, or ET doing original productions itself.
“Hell on Earth: the Kuwaiti Oil Fires” was shot and produced by ET International and Jim Deckard.
The documentaries have been world-changing and have reaped critical acclaim. They’ve included Stripmining the Seas and Closing the Curtains of Death (the pair of documentaries which organized a global campaign to ban deep0sea driftnets). There was Rhino Crisis, also produced by Jim Deckard, which followed rhino horn traffic all the way from Africa to the streets of asia with ET campaigners.
Other productions have included Fall of the Ancients, on the plight of loggerhead turtles, and For All Time, done in conjunction with Honu Project.
The list includes ET originals like Molecular Expose: Saving Whales with DNA, And “Mystery of the Silver Rings” on dolphin vortex-ring sculpture.
And dozens of others, which we hope to bring you here in coming months. Stay tuned!
The Delphis Documentary Machine
In addition to being a one-of-a-kind cutting-edge research lab, the Delphis project was designed from the outset to be a “documentary factory” in which the best imagery and information on dolphins was made available to producers around the world. But there was a catch: any stories using our footage and featuring our research had to – as a licensing condition – link it to the actual plights of dolphins in the real world.
Between 1988 and 2003, crews from all over the world, from student productions to IMAX, from dozens of nations including those actively whaling and killing dolphins, the lab was showcased to bring the plight of dolphins to world attention.
Robin Williams attempts high-speed verbal communication with a dolphin at the Delphis Lab
We could do this because ET has been both a leader in dolphin cognitive and behavioral research, and a leading dolphin-saving organization with an unmatched record of saving dolphins in the wild. Chief scientist Dr. Ken Marten was an especially good spokesperson, since as a former NMFS dolphin observer he had been attacked while trying to count dolphin deaths about US ships, and had testified multiple times before congress. He brought that passion to the research.
Read more about the Delphis program, and the ethics behind it, in ET’s campaigns.
Many hundreds of documentaries, featuring celebrities, scientists, astronauts, futurists and entertainers came out of the Delphis lab and have gone around the world. And they’re still going.
Special Video Events!
Video is often the best way to make a point, and we’ve both created and participated in many such events over the years.
This has included coverage of the Bridges Family Invitational events on Maui, which had Lloyd bring his family and friends to an annual Maui event to raise support for ET and Whales Alive! campaigns.
There have also been many “b-roll” specials producing video of events for insertion into news media stories in the future. Often, that can make a difference between whether the public hears about an issue or doesn’t, such as landmarks in the “Dolphin Friendly Tuna” campaign.
ET’s Don White speaks to over 800 assembled celebrities at the Kauai ET/AOC event for the Driftnet Campaign. Also in the pic are Lloyd Bridges, Ted Danson, Robert Urich.
There have been concert videos, such as Kenny Loggins’ ET benefits. There has been participation in huge projects like the joint ET/American Oceans Campaign event which featured over 800 celebrities spending a week together on Kauai to mark AOC joining the ET-led global driftnet campaign.
And there have been video-old special projects, such as “EarthChild: Let it be Earth Day Every Day”. This video project brought together 100 young celebrities in a musical salute to the values behind Earth Day.
We look forward to bringing some of these productions to this website. And we look forward to new productions in the future. Get involved!
Support the ET Video Campaign!
There’s a lot to communicate, and video gets it done.
ET has huge environmental video archives, but the thousands of hours of archives are still mostly on analog tape media. Bring the best of it into the digital world so it can be shared here, and with the world going forward, is a pretty big deal.
an excerpt from the raw underwater footage of dives on active deep-sea driftnets
This includes:
– masters of many video productions which exist nowhere else.
– Campaign footage going back the better part of 4 decades, including whale and dolphin saving, environmental voyages, behind the scenes of burning postwar Kuwait, undercover footage in wildlife markets, and much more.
– over a thousand hours of Delphis dolphin-lab operations mastered on S-video
– off-air video captures which document many environmental issues as they unfolded.
Bringing this footage into digital formats will take time, effort, and expense – but otherwise it will be unavailable. And it really shouldn’t be. Help bring the ET vid resources forward – contact us about supporting the video campaign!
Issues Gallery
Click Here to review some of the still images we have chosen to tell the ET story, and give us feedback on the ones you think are most powerful.