Shifting Baselines

The Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project was founded by scientist turned filmmaker, Dr. Randy Olson in 2002, with the modus operandi of communicating the gradual declining state of our oceans to a broad audience through the use of comedy/humor and Hollywood Celebrity. Since its creation, it has produced many environmental media campaigns, most notably a 2003 campaign and public service announcement, titled "The Ocean Symphony PSA", which starred such Hollywood actors/celebrities as Jack Black, Henry Winkler, Tom Arnold, and Madeleine Stowe, among many others.

Their slogan of "Create... Innovate... Communicate." has taken on a more direct meaning since the August 2006 launch of the Shifting Baselines Flix Contest, a 1-minute short film contest aimed at channeling the youthful, creative energy of such "viral video" internet sites as Youtube and Ifilm. The contest featured Celebrity Judges, and cash prizes, and succeeded in bringing out an explosion of innovative new ways to communicate the environmental and social messaging associated with ocean awareness and the idea of shifting baselines/lowered standards.

The Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project has 26 partner groups, more than almost any other environmental campaign in the world. Its success and popularity with other environmental organizations is mainly due to its versatile and broad approach that can stretch across the many boundaries of communication that many other media projects cannot.

The Flix contest is an ongoing project. Amateur film-makers, and cinema students the world over have joined in to compete for the editing software and cash prizes offered by the contest. Your films need not be about the ocean, necessarily. You can also make a film about the broader idea of shifting baselines, which refers to the lowered standards created when we can no longer tell what is natural for our world any more. For instance, how do we know how clean our water originally was? Today all of our water has small, but ever-increasing levels of mercury, lead, and other even more poisonous compounds. Certainly a certain amount of that has always been in the water, but how much is normal? How much is natural? And how do we know what "Pristine" is any more? When talking about what is natural we really have no clue what the world was like before human impact, and therefore cannot know what struggles we have to put forward in order to clean up the world and make it liveable and drinkable again.

This meaning of "shifting baselines" is a fairly heavy depressing one. However, many people have taken a much more light-hearted approach to the term, using it to refer to the lowered standards of dating (harder to find good men, say some women!!), the lowered standards of politicians, traffic, television, etc. The broadness of the term allows many hilarious variations on the subject. For further reference see the Shifting Baselines Comedy Contest of 2003, in which comedians from all over the U.S., submitted their videos and stand-up routines on the subject of shifting baselines/lowered standards. That shifting baselines contest was judged by such Hollywood celebrities and industry innovators and Norman Lear, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Bill Maher.

External links

*http://www.sbflixcontest.org
*http://www.shiftingbaselines.org