One of my favorite participatory documentary films is Maquilapolis, a film by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre with the participation of factory workers along the US-Mexico border. I saw it just this year and I was so impressed with the films’ integration of participant footage with very technically sophisticated helicopter shots and artsy scenes.

To create Maquilapolis, the filmmakers brought together factory workers in Tijuana and community organizations in Mexico and the U.S. to collaborate on a film that depicts globalization through the eyes of the women who live on its leading edge. The factory workers who appear in the film have been involved in every stage of production, from planning to shooting, from scripting to outreach. This collaborative process breaks with the traditional documentary practice of dropping into a location, shooting and leaving with the “goods,” which would only repeat the pattern of the maquiladora itself. The process embraces subjectivity as a value and a goal. It merges artmaking with community development to ensure that the film’s voice will be truly that of its subjects.

The filmmaker’s ongoing commitment to the community participants and organizations that they work with led them to hold an intensive video editing workshop just this year. Each participant created a short 3-5 min documentary about their life histories. They will have them posted on the site soon!

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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Okay, I did a lot of tinkering in iMovie ‘08 and it’s so vastly different that I barely knew how to make an edit point. That’s because there are no edit points. iMovie ‘08 works entirely through nudging and slipping and some splitting. But it’s really confusing if you’re at all used to the previous versions of iMovie.

First and foremost, your action keys are no longer the same. So say goodbye to (command) T for a cut. In order to make a cut you now have to select the clip to the point where you want to make the “cut” and then go to your edit tab and select Split Clip. It looks like this:

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What is it & why use it?

Blip.tv is an online video sharing site for videobloggers, podcasters and Internet TV producers. This year, Blip.tv was rated the #1 online video sharing site by PC World. What makes Blip.tv stand out from the crowd is its superior video feeding (meaning that it loads really quickly for viewers) and its revenue share standards. If you are willing to accept advertisements on your video page (which is optional), Blip shares the profit with you 50/50. Advertising is the only proven profit-maker in the online video world and so, unlike the Veoh standard which relies on user pay-per-view, it is pretty certain that video creators will benefit from this deal. Blip is very open about the fact that they do not claim rights to your creative work and that they cannot sell your work for a profit without your express consent. To add to this, video producers will like the fact that viewing quality is very high, but still not as good as DVD, like you may be able to get through a .Mac membership.

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Okay, it’s always hard to take a rough cut and get a fine cut (editing terms for taking your first draft of the movie to a slightly tighter version) and it’s even harder to share that cut with your peers to get notes. Try sending a file larger than 20 MB on any free service provider (i.e. yahoo, gmail, hotmail) and you’ll find it near impossible. So, how do you get a larger account or how do you shrink your .mov or .dv file?

You can always pay to get a “pro” account and these will let you send larger files - the problem of time still remains. It usually takes upwards of ten minutes or more (depending on file size) to send. If you’d like to get these “pro” services here are some providers: Yahoo Mail Plus, Runbox, or You Send It and then there is the option of getting a .Mac account. This is an Apple service that allows you to store things online - think of it as a floating external storage device - and you can give people web addresses to view your projects. Here’s that link: .Mac.

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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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