http://bavc.org/meet/news/press_releases/pr_feb_08.htm

"Four Bay Area Independent Filmmakers win BAVC Media Maker Award"

The BAVC Mediamaker Awards are competitive, in-kind grants of state-of-the-art post-production and new media services and certified training classes, awarded to independent producers each year to help them complete public media projects. These awards provide the crucial resources and technical guidance needed to prepare these projects for national broadcast and multi-platform distribution.

Banker White's We Own TV project uses traditional documentary and community media approaches to tell the story of a group of teenagers, many of them ex-combatants, who have lived through the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone. We Own TV roughly translates in Sierra Leonean Krio to "Our Own TV." The goal of this project is to create a web portal to allow a global community of young people to explore issues such as wartime gender violence, the use of children as soldiers, the effects of being culturally and physically uprooted, and the daily trials and tribulations of refugee life. Banker White is the producer of the award-winning documentary Refugee All-Stars. This project is the first Mediamaker Award supporting new media development and will be used for work in the Innovation Lab to support the interactive web portal, and edit and encode media for multiplatform distribution via the site.