You may or not be familiar with Hometown Baghdad. It’s a video series that brings you into the lives of everyday Iraqis who attempt to live a normal life during the war.
Check out the Q&A on the series at Studio Daily.
A few highlights:
And we began to realize that we would have more freedom and a bigger potential audience than we could have ever hoped for on TV. Once we realized that, we never looked back and have been happy that we didn’t go to TV first.
There’s a paradox for you. We had to go online because TV didn’t want us but because we went online, TV wants us now.
We posted to YouTube because YouTube was built for viral potential. It also has the biggest audience of any other site…. It’s also on some other sites like veoh and dailymotion. And lastly, it’s on Joost. So there are high quality alternatives.
And we shot about 120 hours of footage. And then our editors went through the footage, found the stories and pieced them together. And as you can see, sometimes the stories weren’t so linear. We often found that it was more interesting to show a few different scenes on the theme of losing power in your house than it would have been to just show Adel in his house, losing power and then turning on the generator.
You can view videos from the series at their website Hometown Baghdad.

Tim Gruber and Jenn Ackerman use both photography and video to tell stories for editorial and commercial clients.
Not sure how we might help you?
Coming Soon! Every year we'll be publishing at least two magazines of our work. Look for our first issue soon.