Lunchtime Talk: How to Survive the Future



Building international engagement with a transmedia documentary project

Naomi Smyth and her husband Sam have a combined background in live events, theatre, documentary, environmental science and environmental activism, their new collaborative project is titled: How to Survive the Future.

This interactive mapped journey will be live and online and is about developing skills and learning about resources they might need to survive and raise a family in a collapsed economy, perhaps without the support of a democratic state.

The thesis of the project is that a lot of people across the world are broaching the idea that growth and social progress is reaching an end, personal reasons for this vary from peak oil, climate change, and economic collapse to the end of the world and the completion of the Mayan calendar in 2012. The projects ambition is to locate people with those beliefs and discover how they are preparing for their lives in a collapsed situation and the kind of lifestyles that would be sustainable.

Sailing is a renewable mode of transport, which may be the main reason behind Naomi and Sam’s choice to row across Europe in a £500 boat bought from ebay! Their trip includes various stops in different places, where they hope to meet people, build relationships and skillswap as well as develop a series of episodic documentaries.

The documentaries will include a range of elements: one being a marital soap, as the couple struggle with life on the boat, another representing the skills they learn in a ‘how to’ style as well as character profiles of the people they meet along the way. They hope to continue the ‘how to’ theme by creating videos of the characters demonstrating their different skills.

There will be an online map, that reveals where they are, the journey ahead and route points that will divulge the filming that was generated when they were in each location and the documentaries.

The couple plan to contribute to their personal blogs on a daily basis that will run parallel to one another and present two very different angles of the journey. Part of the blog will include an intermittent crowd funding platform, mobilising their audience to contribute funding, making the project more affordable, in return for this Naomi and Sam will offer personalised objects, messages and gifts.

Social media content will be fed into their website and blogs to set up a clear link to audiences, press and alternative news. In this way the couple hope to establish relationships with key contacts and ‘fixers’ before they arrive to each place so that they are expected when they dock and can plan relevant meetups and activity with the communities and individuals that they visit. Through social media they aim to develop an international voice encouraging people to get in touch with them, recommend people and places to visit as well as generating publicity with local and national press.

Naomi and Sam are interested in expanding audience engagement and suggestions in survival strategies as well as pocalyptic theories. To pass on your skills, contacts and opinions get in touch @SurviveDoc and facebook.com/howtosurvivethefuture