Reel Change

Husband/wife team Anthony Veneziale and Caricia Catalani take their talents and give voice to those in need.

Guideposts Magazine: Inspiring Stories, Inspiring People

By Jen MacNeil
New York, New York
When Anthony Veneziale and Caricia Catalani got married last spring, they wanted to find a way to join not just their lives but their careers. Not an easy feat when he’s a filmmaker and producer and she’s working on a doctorate in public health. They also wanted to use their talents to help empower others.

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Have you ever created a word or excel document with a bunch of website addresses, just so you wouldn’t forget them all? Have you ever sent a friend or colleague a bunch of links that you ran across, because you knew it was right up their alley? Is it getting hard for you to manage the hundreds of bookmarks that you saved on browser? Well… then you were working a lot harder than you have to! Online bookmarking makes all of this easier. And, as a doctoral student that spends a lot of time finding resources on the web, this has helped me to stay sane… and even be helpful to other researchers in my field.

Here is an excerpt by Lisa Pickoff-White from our Participatory Media Guidebook, which I describe in the last blog, explaining what bookmarking is and how to use it to make your life easier.

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In September of this year, I joined a team of graduate students from various disciplines at UC Berkeley to learn about participatory new media and to engage in collective action. As journalists, environmental justice advocates, mass communications specialists, information theory researchers, and public health researchers, we brought a lot of perspectives to the table. Our professors Howard Rheingold (a renowned new media philosopher and collective action maven) and Xiao Qiang (a public scholar and activist blogger from China) led us through many months of new media bootcamp.

After months of reading, analyzing, discussing, blogging, and tagging, we are happy to announce our final project: The Participatory Media Guidebook.

We created the Participatory Media Guidebook to introduce a range of participatory media tools for collective action to activists and social justice organizations around the world. The guide discussed what tools to use and when to use them. It is a wiki, so it will always be evolving and updating. Please participate by adding your own expertise on how to use new media to change the world.

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Introduction to YouTube for Participatory Film

For those of you that are already familiar, this blog may not be of much interest to you. But, for the novice, here is an introduction to YouTube, including the pros/cons of using it, how to upload participatory videos, and how to compare it to other video sharing sites.

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Participatory video techniques have often been employed in the service of public health and research. For example,

• Video Volunteers in India recently collaborated with state sanitation workers to make a video exposing the unhealthy conditions in which they are forced to work;
• Sudden Flowers Productions is putting cameras in the hands of children living with HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia to explore and communicate their real experiences;
• Fly Up Media helped 5th graders from the Bronx to make a film about nutrition and sustainable farming;
• Barefoot Workshops recently launched Finding True North, a video program that works to give a voice to teens who have survived cancer, and let them communicate with kids who are presently dealing with cancer ; and,
• The VideoVoice Collective (our organization) recently finished a video on innovative approaches to encouraging healthy aging with the California Senior Leaders Program.

The list of public health-oriented participatory video projects and programs is expanding everyday. However, these projects are almost entirely uninformed by the research and experiences of community-based participatory research (CBPR) and vice versa, even though the two fields have a lot to learn from each other.

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