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LAMP Alumi – Journey Beyond Road Trauma Launches
At the 8th LAMP residential, an international event with three New Zealand teams, held in Marysville, Victoria several excellent projects surfaced. Originally called “Touched by the Road Toll” it was led by Sandra Cook (Producer/Creator), Kerry Sunderland (Online Producer/Designer) and Tamsin Smyth (Designer) with Laurel Papworth a ‘guardian’ mentor. Since then the Sandra and Kerry have worked hard to get this very worth project off the ground and launched. So it was fabulous to find out a few weeks ago that Journey Beyond Road Trauma has launched and is doing extremely well in activating and bonding a community affected by road tragedies.
Sandra contacted LAMP and told us all about the project and it’s journey over the past two years and sent us some more background as to the purpose of the community site.
Sandra Cook and Kerry Sunderland are the co-founders of Journey Beyond Road Trauma. Kerry and Sandra joined forces in late 2007 after working together on a documentary called ‘The Burning Season’. In Feb 2008, they formed a new company called Online Story Exchange to oversee production of the first stage of the project.
Sandra recently said “Since the launch of our testing site four weeks ago, people from all over Australia have joined the community in an overwhelming show of support for each other. People have set up profiles, created memory spaces, connected with each other, told their story and marked the scene of a collision on Google Maps.”
A lot more about the project below:
Behind every fatality and serious injury statistic there are thousands of stories. Tell your story to educate others about the impact of careless driving. A community site for collective healing, remembrance and positive action Journey Beyond Road Trauma is an online social network for all those affected by road trauma. The site is a space where you can find a network of support, a way to connect, a place to remember and tools to be positive and pro-active.
Whether the crash was yesterday or 15 years ago, the site can be used as an intimate place of sharing with family or friends, or can be used to engage with a broader online community. The community is also a resource for the all Australians, particularly those with an interest in road safety as well as those who are affected by road trauma in their workplace (emergency services, lawyers, health workers and so on).
When you join the community you will be able to:
- Set up a profile
- Connect with others affected by road trauma
- Tell your story with blogs and video
- Watch short documentaries.
- Mark the scene of the collision (a virtual roadside memorial mark) on a Google Map
In Australia there are about 1600 deaths on our roads every year. Alarmingly, another 140 people are seriously injured each day. The site provides a contact point for people to access counselling services, legal services, victims of crime support, road safety education programs and disability carers. Under the guidance of road safety experts, the community can channel their grief into positive action by collectively campaigning for road safety. The online space can also be used as an educational resource to complement already existing road safety campaigns.
Where did the concept for this project come from and why did you do this?
In Adelaide, at 7:15am on Thursday the 11th of March 2004, Sandra’s father was critically injured on a suburban road when driving to work. He didn’t die at the scene. He was taken to hospital and died 11 days later when the family made the agonising decision to turn off his life support. Exactly one year after the crash, as a way of coping, Sandra decided to start filming her family. She wanted to document not only her family’s grief and shock, but primarily their search for justice as the cogs turned ever more slowly in what seemed to be an endless, impersonal and ineffective legal system. Her family had no idea what caused the accident. The driver who caused the crash was charged with ‘Causing death by dangerous driving’, but it would be over two and a half years before the family sat in a courtroom and began to piece together the story of that fateful day. All they knew was that a woman on her way home from working night duty as a nurse crossed the median strip from the other side of the road and hit her father’s car head on. At the trial they learnt that the driver suffered from chronic knee pain and as a result was taking more than 1200mg of morphine a day, which is a bigger dose than what is typically prescribed to a terminally ill cancer patient. As the story unfolded, the family’s relationship with the driver became complicated and disappointing when verbal promises that were made in a Restorative Justice conference were not honored. Sandra stopped filming; the documentary became a story she didn’t want to tell. She didn’t have a happy ending so she put all the tapes in a carton and stashed her vision in the back of a cupboard. But, over time, Sandra recognised that the art form of documentary filmmaking is changing rapidly, with the single approach of a ‘one-hour documentary for television’ becoming a notion of the past.
As digital media platforms converge, documentary makers need to tell stories in innovative ways, engaging the wider web audience.
A year or so after Sandra officially quit, she began to contemplate how the project could work online and engage the thousands of other people affected by road trauma. It was at this point, about three days before Christmas in 2007 that Sandra teamed up with multi-platform documentary writer/producer Kerry Sunderland who she had met while working on ‘The Burning Season’. Fortunately, soon after, Sandra and Kerry were accepted into the Australian Film Television and Radio School’s Laboratory of Advanced Media Production (LAMP). It was the best thing that could have happened for the project. In February 2008 Kerry and Sandra travelled to the beautiful town of Marysville, Victoria to attend LAMP. At LAMP, under the mentorship of Australian and International digital media experts, they developed and workshopped the project with the most bright, witty, clever and creative minds. The live-in workshop was almost a year to the date before the tragic Black Saturday fires. After LAMP Sandra and Kerry set out to research how the project could be an effective tool in road safety education.
When Journey Beyond Road Trauma was in the very early stages of development it was accepted into the Australian Film Television and Radio School’s Laboratory of Advanced Media Production (LAMP). In February 2008 Kerry and Sandra travelled to Marysville Victoria to attend LAMP. At LAMP, under the mentorship of Australian and international digital media experts including Gary Hayes, Anthony Eden, Laurel Papworth and Matt Costello, they developed and produced an Electronic Proof of Concept (EPOC) for the web site. It was this EPOC that enabled Sandra Cook and Kerry Sunderland to secure development funding from the South Australian Film Corporation. Kerry and Sandra subsequently received a $100,000 grant through Screen Australia’s Cross-Platform Digital Media Production Fund. The project is also sponsored by the Royal Automobile Association (RAA) and has received a grant from the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation foundation.
Kerry and Sandra spent a year researching and meeting with some of Australia’s pre-eminent road safety experts to learn how this project could be effective in road safety education. Those experts include:
- Lachlan McIntosh AM, Asia Pacific Director of the International Road Assessment Program (iRap) and Chairman of the Australasian College of Road Safety
- John Goldsworthy, Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government
- Professor Barry Watson, Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q).
Follow the team and find out more on:
CONTACT
- Sandra Cook – Director / Producer p: 0413 146 013 e: sandracook@onlinestoryexchange.com
- Michelle Kelly – Online Marketing Co-ordinator p: 0431 011 050 e: michellekelly@onlinestoryexchange.com
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