Dear Human Banner-SF Community,
My deepest thanks to everyone who turned out for yesterday's "TRUMP / EPSTEIN — FILES TO TRIALS" human banner. You were quite a spirited and cooperative crowd. Human banner #38 was a phenomenal success. Thirty-eight. It feels surreal to have just typed that number, but there it is.
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Our entire production team is thrilled that the San Francisco Chronicle put up its own drone and featured three overhead photos and a short video on their website yesterday, plus a nice little account of the event: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/ocean-beach-epstein-trump-protest-22298829.php
My favorite of the clips I’ve seen so far is this 17-second one by our own master drone pilot Jack Morris, posted to our YouTube channel...
During this past week, co-organizer Travis Van Brasch pushed hard (and rightfully) for deploying black landscape fabric (instead of people) to create the black lines of the file folder’s edges, and that was absolutely the right call. We would have needed at least another 500 people to form those lines and I don't think lines of people would have been so stark, so straight, so impressive.
Erin O'Donnell-Worley, who showed up out of nowhere a year ago and joined the Human Banner-SF Team, has taken off my plate the crucial task of creating the graphs we work from on Game Day. None of our tasks is more crucial, and none of them is as tricky.
I have literally been up all night at least a couple of times finalizing past graphs — sometimes completely reworking them. By the end of yesterday's banner, Erin looked (and admitted to being) exhausted. And she should have been! She also oversaw (with Travis) the imprinting of all the necessary outlines of the whole image onto the sand.
Exhausted as I am from yesterday, I was elated to have Erin and Travis (and 30-40 other early morning volunteers) take those jobs from me and pull off everything with such precision.
So many other people to mention here, but so little time. I need to drive the U-haul with all the tools and gear to our storage locker, where Travis and I will unload it all, starting 29 minutes from now.
THANK YOU FOR COMING! YOU WERE A GREAT CROWD!
Warmly,
Brad Newsham, Travis and the whole Human Banner-SF Team
A lot of our hardest work of these banners is done beforehand. Brad, Annie, Cathi, Brahna, Bill, and Sally at Thursday’s four-hour tarp sorting party in Oakland.