How to Save the Planet? Buy Green

Star reporter Lee West investigates the confusing world ‘Carbon Offsets’ in the latest Center For Investigative Reporting and Media Factory series of reports on the Environment.

Biodiesel in Berkeley

The Media Factory wrote produced and filmed this news report for the Discovery’s new cell phone channel.

Robot Get My Soda

The Media Factory wrote, directed, edited, produced and filmed this video podcast for Lego Minstroms NXT robot division. Lego wanted to market Lego Robots to a cool urban audience. We put our man Lee West on the job and he came up with the “Bro’bot.”

Robotic Second Life



Trailer
A new short fiction film shot by novelist and filmmaker Emer Martin (Breakfast in Babylon) and starring Maria Hayden (Bloom) (The Dead) and produced by Niall McKay and the Media Factory. The movie features novelist Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) as a social worker who finds a traumatized young boy from Africa on the streets of Dublin.

CoolBots

The Bass Player

Irish Journalist Niall McKay, accompanies his father, Jim a Jazz bass player, on his return home from Zurich to Dublin following the death of Jim’s second wife Anna in a story about one retired immigrants search for love, adventure and a place to call home. In production.

Frontline World: Northern Ireland

In a new online film about the peace process in Northern Ireland for PBS’s Frontline World, Irish journalist Niall McKay takes a journey to Belfast, and finds that the hard work of forgiving has begun. Niall McKay and Marissa Aroy’s film introduces Catholics and Protestants who are trying to heal their communities and find ways to talk to each other across old divides.

Paycheck Records

The Tenderloin

San Francisco’s Tenderloin district is known for many things, such as homelessness, drug trade, strip clubs and transgender prostitution. But it’s also the location of some of the city’s best ethnic restaurants, hip bars and trendy clubs. Niall McKay reports.

Art Oakland Style

Many artists cut their milk teeth sketching nudes in some stuffed up little conservatory, but in Oakland it all begins down the “train tracks”. The result is art that is diverse, urban, and somehow more real than its gentile counterpart in San Francisco. Art Oakland-Style is a short film about the alternative Oakland art scene and features artists such as Adam 5100 whose stencil-based spray painting is in this month’s Harpers Magazine. Presented by artist and skateboarder Lee Alonzo West the film is a celebration of the next generation of Bay Area artists.

Discovery News: Life on Mars

It’s a dilemma that has dogged man since the beginning of time. Are we alone in the universe or are their other forms of life out there. Well at NASA, scientists are asking that very question.

Discovery News: Nanotechnology

NASA scientists have found that extremophile microbes can be used to create a new generation of nano scale electronics such as data storage devices. Niall McKay reports from NASA’s Aims Research Laboratory in Silicon Valley.

CORPORATE

Level Playing Field Institute
The videos produced by Media Factory are a key part of LPFI’s fundraising and recruiting strategy. Media Factory has worked with LPFI since 2001 when the first group of students from its flagship educational program, the Institute for Diversity in Education and Leadership (IDEAL), was organized.

Chinatown Community Development Center

The film highlighted the successful reconstruction of the International Hotel, 30 years after the controversial tearing down of the building that was home to many Filipino and Chinese seniors.

Level Playing Field Institute

The IDEAL program supports underrepresented students that are attending UC Berkeley with their educational and career goals and its sponsors range from private individuals to Vodafone USA and IBM.

Filipina Women’s Network

Media Factory created two television commercials for The Filipina Women’s Network. The first commercial, for the FWN 2005 Leadership Summit aired nationally on the ABS-CBN network in November 2005. The latest commercial was for the first Filipino-language production of The Vagina Monologues, staged at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, CA in February 2006.

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The New Irish

The high-tech industry has brought diversity, prosperity and racial tension to the Emerald Isle. The Irish like to welcome visitors with the Gaelic phrase “Cead Mile Failte” meaning “100 thousand Welcomes” but foreigners who want to stay in Ireland may not get such a warm welcome. In the past five years, tens of thousands of new immigrants have arrived to work in Ireland’s booming economy. This is a story of how the New Ireland will cope with new affluence and the ensuing multiculturalism.