China’s Green Beat is the premiere green media outlet in China, providing information, education, and entertainment concerning China’s environmental issues, and engaging people to live greener, design greener, and invest greener. China’s Green Beat attracts viewers through its fun, engaging short films and seeks to “turn eyeballs into action” using various online community tools.
John, Shane, and Rene, the so-called “green brothers”, created more than ten short films with their own cameras and supplement the content with field-interviews and bilingual subtitles. Much of the content of the video podcasts cover topics related to everyday life (for example, an episode on solar water heaters, which are widely used in China). While some of the pieces are done in documentary form, others are done in a comedy/drama format in order to teach people about environmental issues through characters and stories. Here is a list of China’s Green Beat’s short films to date:
1. Beijing’s Three Wheeled Bikes: How Waste Gets Around
2. Rooftop Revolution: China’s 40 million Solar Water Heaters
3. Biomass Power: The Potential to Replace Coal?
4. Sun Zhe’s Public Transportation Adventures
5. Wind Energy in China and the Clean Development Mechanism
6. Green Dating Gone Wrong
7. No Car Day in Kunming
8. Shanghai: Excessive Packaging
9. Hong Kong: Consumed!
10. Bio-energy in Rural Yunnan
In April, China’s Green Beat developed its first collaborative effort with China Dialogue, a bilingual website fostering international discussion on the environment. Together, they hosted a 3-day video training workshop in Beijing, bringing in 30 students from all over China to receive training in how to make a Green Beat video, a video that teaches the viewer about environmental solutions and engages them to take action. Over the next two months, new content will be released on China’s Green Beat and China Dialogue websites that was produced as a result of this conference and the efforts of students all across China. Here is a preview of what’s ahead.
Not long after its initial launch in September 2007, China’s Green Beat videos have already attracted over 20,000 viewers, half from within China and half from other countries.
From its inception in September 2007, China’s Green Beat has caught many eyes in the international blogosphere, including Time Magazine’s China Blog, BoingBoing, Danwei, and Treehugger. The green brothers were also featured in a full page article of the Sunday edition of the South China Morning Post in April 2008, after holding their successful video training meeting in Beijing. Among Chinese press, China’s Green Beat has been reported on in the popular science magazine Focus (新知客) and is currently developing partnerships with the science branch of 163.com.
Green China, Make it Happen!!!! Supporting~~~~~
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[...] Rene Ng to raise awareness about environmental issues in China. The project has developed more than ten short films, complete with bilingual Chinese-English [...]