By Devlin Smith
The African Well Fund has premiered a YouTube video to promote the seventh annual Build a Well for Bono’s Birthday. Spearheaded by AWF Vice Chairman Rob Trigalet, the one-minute video combines pictures and videos of past AWF project sites with the music of Wheaton, Ill.-based Sleeping at Last to encourage people to donate to the Build a Well for Bono’s Birthday fundraiser.
AWF supporters are encouraged to post the video on their own Web pages and share it with friends to promote Build a Well for Bono’s Birthday.
Trigalet answered a few questions about the video and the impact he hopes it makes.
Why did you want to create a video promoting BBW this year?
Well, just like everybody else, the AWF has been affected by the economy and we recognize that people are worried about their finances but, in relative terms, most of us are still living like kings compared to the poorest of the poor. Every person in America has access to clean drinking water, water that won’t make them sick, so the video was just a way to try give people out there a head’s up, that, yes we know the economy is bad but this issue, the issue that we here at AWF live and breathe everyday, hasn’t gone away. It’s still a reality for the almost 300 million people in Africa that still don’t have access to clean drinking water.
How did you come up with the concept for the video? Who helped you put this together?
My original idea was to just have a short 30- or 60-second sort of commercial for the Build a Well For Bono’s Birthday fundraiser and just to show some the pictures that AWF board member Angela Martens took in Uganda of the bad water people are forced to use and then throw some stats up in between the pictures. But I went to a friend of mine, John Spencer, who is an independent film maker and he had the idea to not show any of the “before” pictures and just to try and show people what has been accomplished by these fundraisers, and it just really seemed to fit the mood of the music better.
Tell me a bit about the music. Who is the band? How did you get them involved? Why do you think their song fits the video?
The band is called Sleeping At Last and I first heard them about a year ago when a friend played me some of their music and the very next day I went online and ordered all of their CDs. For me, the music has an underlying real joy to it. This same friend had had some contact with them and he thought they might let me use one of their songs, so I e-mailed their management and they were very supportive of the idea.
What response are you hoping the video gets?
If it brings people to the Web site and gets them interested in what we do, that would be all that I could ask for it. Secondly, I love to share my favorite music with other people, so I hope people would check out Sleeping At Last as well.
