The film about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony that gained worldwide attention this week has been criticized for oversimplifying a complicated issue in order to create a viral sensation.

But that was basically the point, filmmaker Jason Russell says.

“Obviously there are other important criminals in Kony’s army, but Kony is the persona and the face,” he said. “We felt, with branding, it’s important to go after the one that everyone can see and recognize.”

Russell and his colleagues in the Invisible Children group wanted to send a simple message with their Kony 2012 campaign: Capture Kony, whose army consists of child soldiers abducted from villages throughout Central Africa.

The Kony 2012 video and subsequent social media campaign blew up the Internet this week after it was released, racking up more than 50 million views in two days.

Russell had a less ambitious goal: 500,000 views by the end of the year.

Read more: Kony 2012 goes viral, but also draws critics

Russell said he learned from the vague messaging of the Occupy movement, which he felt lacked branding and focus. So Invisible Children decided upon a simple story with one bad guy and a solution.

The bad guy is Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. He has terrorized Eastern and Central Africa for 25 years, and his army still launches deadly raids on villages to maintain its supplies, the UN’s refugee agency says.

The solution is capturing him this year and disarming the LRA.

Russell, 33, grew up in a San Diego suburb as a “typical white Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” as he puts it. He first visited Africa on a month-long evangelical mission to Kenya in 2000.

“I didn’t feel like it was affecting people,” Russell said. “They didn’t need faith, they needed malarial and HIV medicine and protection for their women and children.”

After finishing film school at the University of Southern California, he returned to Africa to make a documentary, along with friends Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole, about the genocide in Darfur.

They ended up in Uganda, where they filmed a short documentary in 2003 about children who, fearing abduction by the LRA, walked miles each night to Gulu Town, in a region mainly populated by the Acholi people, to sleep on stoops and in shelters.

Together the three friends started Invisible Children, a charity that is part film company and part non-governmental organization in northern Uganda.

“That six-month project turned into the last nine years of my life,” Russell told the Star.

While the Kony 2012 video has gained worldwide media attention, it has also brought intense scrutiny for Invisible Children.

Ryan Butyniec, a researcher who’s spent eight years studying the conflict and working in northern Uganda, said there are problems with the group’s methods and messages.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“There’s a lot of inconsistencies with what they purport and what is actually the reality on the ground,” Butyniec said.

He pointed to Invisible Children’s bracelet campaign, which sells bracelets made by internally displaced Ugandans who have recently returned home, “giving them the chance to earn a good income by making culturally unique bracelets,” according to their website.

But when Butyniec was invited to Kampala by a local politician and saw the bracelets being made, he said he discovered that to keep up with sales demands, women were working in “very poor standards.”

The help Invisible Children does offer the Acholi people doesn’t stretch very far, Butyniec said.

“Just like most NGOs, they drive around in their white land cruisers, but they don’t actually do much out in the district,” he said. “And that’s lent to this idea that they’re not really there for the Acholi people.”

Invisible Children spends one-third of its charity dollars on projects in Uganda, including schools, a rehabilitation centre and a radio tower network that tracks claims of LRA attacks. Another third goes to their movement, Russell said, which includes vehicles, Internet access, phones and events. And the final third goes to filmmaking.

Russell rejects criticism that the group should spend more on aid work and less on its film budget.

“We are so proud of that because we feel we tell really powerful stories,” he said.

Invisible Children’s future may rest in campaigns similar to Kony 2012.

“We’re really branding the International Criminal Court as the place to bring people that act like Darth Vader or Lord Voldemort,” Russell said. “There are bad guys in the world and you are not allowed to get away with murder, and if you do, we’re coming after you.”

Despite the backlash, he is unapologetic about his film and his organization.

“This is about justice for a warlord,” he said. “If you don’t want to support us, don’t. If you want to hate us, hate us. But don’t lose sight of the vision to stop Kony this year, 2012.”