Who: Travis Mathews
What: Documentary short films and video journalism for current TV and other outlets
Why: To draw attention to news stories that mainstream media rarely touches
Mathews behind the camera, a Panasonic DVX-100B. Photo by: Samantha Berg

There’s very little of the sensationalism or high gloss of mainstream media that attracts documentary filmmaker and video journalist Travis Mathews, who’s based in San Francisco but has traveled far and wide to produce films and video stories for Current TV (current.com). If you’re wondering why you might have heard of it, Vice President Al Gore is chairman of Current TV, which is an Emmy-winning website and 24-hour global cable and satellite TV channel “produced and programmed in collaboration with its audience.”

 

Mathews has a bachelor’s degree in media and film studies from Ohio State and a master’s in counseling from the California Institute of Integral Studies, but he was drawn into video journalism and documentary filmmaking largely because video-editing software, such as Apple’s Final 
Cut Pro, made it possible for him to be a one-
man show.

“I’ve always had an interest in both filmmaking and social justice–oriented issues, but it was not until the advent of Final Cut Pro that I really realized that—and at the same time, digital video cameras were coming down in price but increasing in sophistication,” Mathews says.

A San Mateo boy jumps up so cooking smoke will get in his hair and kill the flies, from Mathews’ documentary Health of Belize Community Hangs in the Balance.

“For the last seven to eight years, I’ve been getting more and more involved in video. I did a documentary in 2005 called Do I Look Fat? about gay men and body-image issues” (see www
.doilookfatthemovie.com.) It was featured at film festivals and all—but probably, more importantly, it went to different college campuses. I got to travel with the film, and I got the bite from the success of that, realizing video was an enormously effective way to reach people and to generate change.”

Kelly Cochran performs with the Phat Fly Girls in Mathews’ video piece, Fat Activism Goes Big.

As a documentary filmmaker, Mathews is largely self-taught. “I knew I had the skills, I knew I had the eye, and the ability to pitch good stories that aren’t being told, so I just started to do it, without a real clear idea of what my outlet was going to be,” he says. “I first started doing it for myself, and then I started sending things I was doing to different people, friends, organizations, and professional people to see their reception and just to get feedback. I started to hone what I was doing and quickly got involved with Current TV. I’ve had a really good kind of freelance partnership with them, where either they’ll commission me to do a piece, or I’ve pitched something to them and it ends up airing both online and then on their subscriber cable channel.”

As far as following a set career path, Mathews says there really is no such thing in his field. “It’s a whole new world out there, what people are doing with video journalism, so it’s a little bit uncharted,” he says.

Mathews stays off camera at all times in his pieces, but his work is not always as straightforward as being commissioned to produce video stories that he films, edits, submits, and then never looks 
at again.

In San Francisco, for example, when the city attorney and a nonprofit group staffed mostly by ex-gang members called HOMEY (homeysf.org) were at loggerheads over a gang injunction that instituted a system of “safety zones” intended to combat gang violence, Mathews helped broker a meeting between the parties so they could sit down and discuss points of contention. As part of the deal, Mathews was granted permission to film the meeting.

“What was good about it was that it wasn’t just that I was putting the city attorney in a position where he was on tape and he would have to put his money where his mouth is,” Mathews says, “it was also that I was showing these guys from HOMEY working and actually having a constructive conversation with the city attorney. Because on the streets, and even within HOMEY, the people at the head of the organization, there’s a lot of bitterness and resentment—all these negative feelings toward City Hall.”

The piece was set to air on Current TV in late 2008, having been delayed because Current was focusing on last fall’s presidential election. On the very day in late November that we interviewed Mathews for this article, the San Francisco city attorney had agreed to meet with HOMEY representatives in the affected neighborhoods to “walk the street and hear concerns of the people who are being directly impacted by the gang injunction,” Mathews says. “Because [some community members and groups like HOMEY] have complained that since safety zones have come into play, police are patrolling the safety zones, they’re racial profiling—they are intimidating people that previously hadn’t been getting that type of attention.”

Students at the Holy Anglican School on Ambergris Caye in Belize.

An earlier piece aired on Current TV that Mathews filmed in Belize drew attention to the economic situation of the people from a village called San Mateo on Ambergris Caye Island and the life-altering school opened by missionaries there in 2006. “It’s the same island Madonna sang about in ‘La Isla Bonita,’” Mathews says. “It’s like a quarter of a mile between a million-dollar resort and these people living in total squalor. It’s probably the same story that’s echoed in many coastal, warm-climate resort areas, where just behind the shadows there’s a poverty-stricken community.”

“So what’s interesting particularly about this was that the conscience of the school started to thrive, and they started to also provide services like dental care and health care—they were providing all these things the government wasn’t providing.” At the same time, Mathews adds, “The land was being eyed as valuable property, where they could dump some sand on it, expand to the property, and put condos on it. It’s another common story of gentrification—displacing people and that kind of thing.

“Long story short,” Mathews concludes, “I did a video highlighting this and I was able to hang out with a couple of really lovely families there, and the video has been used as part of the arsenal for the school to show what they’re doing and to fight developers. Using the video, they’ve been able to raise a lot of attention and money to help them.”

Except for the crucial tech assist from his a dual-core Mac Pro, Panasonic, DVX100B video camera, and Final Cut Pro 5.1, Mathews is a one-man operation. “I’ll also use Motion to do text titles, or if I have to, zoom in on a map somewhere to let people know where a video is taking place.”

Mathews says much of what fuels his video work is passion. Good thing, since it’s certainly not bringing him big bucks—at least not yet.

“It’s a passion and it’s an investment because I can barely pay the rent with what I’m doing right now,” he says. “But I trust that it’s going  to lead to something more lucrative and interesting.”

For more about Mathews’ work, see travisdmathews.com.