Kickstarter to fund Baltimore journalist Matthew VanDyke’s documentary about Syrian revolution [VIDEO]

Updated 10:44 p.m. 8/19/12: In an e-mail to Technically Baltimore, VanDyke says that the Washington Post article in which he notes growing up as a spoiled brat “is a quote that is clearly about how I was raised (past), not how I am (present).”
Updated 10:10 a.m. 8/15/12: According to VanDyke’s biography on his website, he worked as a war correspondent for the now defunct Baltimore Examiner in January and February 2009, and not during 2010. The story has been corrected to reflect this.
Baltimore’s Matthew VanDyke plans to travel to Syria in September to shoot a documentary film about the revolution currently underway in Syria. He’s funding the project through Kickstarter, but with one week left to go, has raised less than $2,500 of the $19,500 goal.
Visit his Kickstarter here.

VanDyke, a self-proclaimed “spoiled brat” who grew up in South Baltimore and attended the University of Maryland Baltimore County, is a documentary filmmaker, journalist and war correspondent. He was embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq in 2009 and 2010, reporting for the Baltimore Examiner in January and February 2009 and doing independent filming in November and December 2010. (The Baltimore Examiner closed in February 2009.) More recently, in spring 2011, he traveled to Libya during the Arab Spring period and fought with Libyan rebels against Muammar al-Gaddafi, during which time he ended up in Libyan prison for six months. (VanDyke maintains that he was not working as a journalist in Libya.)
According to VanDyke’s Kickstarter page, the goal of the film project in Syria is to “[m]ake a groundbreaking and unique documentary film about the Syrian revolution and the Arab Spring that will be released on the internet for free to a potential audience of millions (similar to the method used to distribute the film Kony 2012).”