Nobody can predict when history will strike, but if it does, it's always best to have a video camera.
For Gibsons-born filmmaker Velcrow Ripper, it always helps to find yourself in the right place at the right time.
"Alright you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there," reads a now infamous July blog post from Vancouver's culture-jamming Adbusters publication. "A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future."
On Sept. 17, 2011, soon after that fateful call to arms, Manhattan's Zuccotti Park was flooded with protesters and their tents, those lamenting a consolidation of elitist power with the now infamous slogan "we are the 99 per cent."
At the time, Ripper found himself living in Brooklyn, having moved there with his partner while she went to school.
He read the Adbusters article and decided to see the results himself, thinking that perhaps he might just be in the right place at the right time.
"So I decided I would go down and check it out and found myself at the heart of one of the most amazing, now global, movements that I've ever seen," he said.
It would begin a foray into the world of Occupy that would see him begin production on the third installment of his Fierce Love documentary series: Occupy Love.
Quickly inspired by what he called a global revolution of the heart, Ripper found himself skirting around the world, chasing the numerous threads of a change in consciousness he traced back to Egypt's Tahrir Square and the dawn of the Arab Spring.
England, Spain, Egypt, Afghan-istan: Ripper took his immersive brand of filmmaking the world over to gather the footage for what would become Occupy Love.
Not intent to just document, he wanted to catalyze and help foster a change in human consciousness - to help lift the movement by not only capturing it, but participating in it as well.
"What is it that links the movement and what's at the heart of it? I believe - and I'm finding that really the root of it - is compassion," he explained. "We're working towards a world that works for everyone and a world that works for all life."
Back in Brooklyn, Ripper is currently piecing together what will be another installment in his line of award-winning documentaries. One notable aspect of Occupy Love, which he hopes to have released this fall, is that it's completely funded by community and crowd support.
The hope is that through community participation, the project can become a moral compass for the movement as a whole, a repeatable theme that can be built upon over time using its web presence and tools like YouTube and Twitter, where Occupy Love topics are shared through the hashtag #OccupyLove.
Residents on the Coast will get a chance to view the film as well, Ripper promised, as he's managed to return home to showcase his previous works and give presentations on the topics.
For now his focus remains on producing the final piece while seeking out the needed funding from grassroots supporters and spreading the romantic revolution.
Information related to the project can be found at www.occupylove.org.
"The occupy movement has really succeeded in changing the conversation, and that's one of the great successes of it," Ripper said.
"So it's really a hopeful time in history. The question of the film is how can the crises we're facing, economic and ecological, become a love story."
