“duckrabbit are master storytellers. They don’t just tell people about what you do, they make them care about what you do.“
Paul Murphy, Director C21 VOX
Photojournalist David White and BBC Radio 4 documentaries producer Benjamin Chesterton are UK-based duckrabbit. Together they are an award winning production/journalism team who combine the power of still images and sound to provoke change.
Benjamin Chesterton – Head of Production & Master Class Leader, duckrabbit
Benjamin is a British journalist and radio documentary producer.
He started producing radio documentaries in his bedroom when he was 22, when he was washing dishes in a Liverpool cafe for money. The local radio station felt sorry enough for him to put his work on air at some unknown hour when only God was listening. Ben was cool with that, because it turned out God liked what he heard. Most of the people he interviewed in his programs were customers in the cafe where he worked. People who had nothing better to do than string out a cold cup of coffee for two hours on a Wednesday afternoon usually have a great story to tell. That was the start of his career: bringing voices to the airwaves that you wouldn’t otherwise hear.
The awards that followed led the Observer newspaper to profile Ben as one of “Radio’s biggest turn-on’s” and he finally got to sack off dishwashing to go and make documentaries for the world’s greatest speech radio station, BBC Radio 4.
He’s never been able to escape the feeling that “life is elsewhere,” so he was soon on the run again, leading a humanitarian radio project in Ethiopia for a year. Afterwards life in the UK felt meaningless and dull. Then it all kicked off in Kenya following some very dodgy elections. Ben ditched his job at the BBC and spent three months working with local community radio station in the Rift Valley, supporting them to cover the humanitarian crisis. This was where he started to produce multimedia pieces about life in the camps for displaced people, using the pieces to motivate journalists to visit the camps and tell the stories of those living there. It worked and soon, for the first time, you were regularly hearing the voices of people living in the camps, not just the politicians whose greed had put them there.
Back in the UK, Ben teamed up with the amazing photographer David White to see if they could use multimedia to a similar effect in the UK. At the end of 2008, duckrabbit was born.
Daniel Seguin – Producer & Workshop Curator, duckrabbit Canada (a.k.a. Mooserabbit )
Daniel is a consultant, disruptor, photographer who works at the intersection of design, insight, and engagement. He’s ambitiously intent on purposeful social-change. Daniel’s glass is half-full.
As a former elementary school teacher, Daniel walked out of the ailing educational system and into the field of large-scale systemic change. The current focus of his work as a change consultant is designing learning spaces in which individuals, groups, communities and organizations create their desirable future. Daniel works to create the conditions in which people can be purposeful and strive for their ideals.
Recently based in Montreal, he couldn’t afford to go to the UK to attend a duckrabbit workshop. Instead, Daniel thought to bring duckrabbit to him. His goal was simply to create the workshop he always wanted to attend and then, attend it. Thus was born duckrabbit Canada.
Testimonials
“Thank you Ben and duckrabbit for an incredibly full on, hard working, inspirational and challenging weekend spent learning how to make photo films. To work together watching, critiquing and producing in one short weekend an (almost) finished piece was a brilliant experience. It’s now time to get on with more of my own work and hopefully put into practice what I learned here. The most important thing, I think, is to know what’s out there, what works what doesn’t and why. The power of the photo film can be huge, I only hope I am now on my way to making some work which is as powerful and thought provoking as some we watched this weekend.”
Sophie Gerrard
“It may seem fanciful to suggest that one can learn multimedia story telling in just a couple of days, but duckrabbit gave us everything we needed from skills in interviewing and audio editing to image selection techniques in that short time. And did in such a way that left us with a passion to develop further. A transformative experience.”
Gareth Dent, Chief Executive, Open College of the Arts
“Before doing this training I felt I could have a decent stab at recording audio in the Congo. I now know that it would have taken some sort of miracle for me to get really useful audio. I now have the tools to come back with something a bit special. Thank you.”
Robin Meldrum, Publications Officer, Doctors Without Borders
