Saturday we went on a moving and rich tour of the Ahogado watershed and a portion of the Santiago watershed with two classes of students from Iteso, a Jesuit college located on the outskirts of Guadalajara. While we are still wrapping up our workshops in Juanacatán and El Salto, we began workshops with approximately 50 students at Iteso in collaboration with the professor and our friend, Étienne. There are some great photos of the journey, click here to peruse them all. Read more »
We are incredibly excited to share the first of many videos created in the popular education workshops we are running in Juanacatlán and Guadalajara. Karen, Lety, and Cristian live in and around Juanacatlán, and are students at the local high school. Their video is moving and they worked very hard to piece it together. We are so proud! Please ost the video and share it; they made the video to make positive change for their communities and we want to help spread the word.
Deep in the A2S headquarters, amidst website development and lots of video logging, we have been discussing how to make a video go viral. You post it on youtube, you tag it, you give it a fun catchy name, you bless it with the social media gods, and hope it takes off. Ok, so far so good, until we get to the take off part. Yes, there are experts with many varying ideas for success and I have read quite a few of them – mix luck and a huge network, and you’re getting close. If you have contacts at other blogs you can ask them to embed it and we certainly haven’t exhausted all our resources in that vein yet. We work it on Facebook and Twitter, and do have some success. But it is difficult, preparing to launch the first videos created by our workshop participants and being uncertain how far and wide we can spread them. The workshop participants need to get these videos out to make change and gain support to clean up the river. What can we do?
We are really excited to share this short video about the process and participants of our video workshops. Consider this a trailer for the videos they created which we should be posting soon! As always, we look forward to feedback and questions. We plan to publish our video workshop methodology, which is popular education based, once it is more refined.
We wanted to share some photos from our video workshops, the town of Juanacatlán, and the Río Santiago waterfall we often mention. If you click on any photo, it will enlarge and you can easily peruse all of them. To view our whole photo collection, click on this link.
The Río Santiago’s state of contamination is a really complicated issue, with many sides. For this post I took a two pronged approach to begin understanding and explaining the issue. First, there is a simple breakdown of the industrial and municipal contributors. Second, a stirring first person account of the river’s transformation as it “changed from being a river of life to a river of death.” We have received a lot of comments and emails asking for more information about the Río Santiago, and how this situation has gotten so bad. We are exploring this issue in our documentary, and will be running video workshops in Guadalajara to capture another side to this history. In short, there is still a lot for us to discover and learn, but we are happy to share some of what we have gathered thus far.
Directly below, there is a breakdown of the human and industrial pollution in the river. Disclaimer: there is a real lack of scientific studies so this data is outdated (2003). Currently, the first major medical study is being conducted in the area and the data from an extensive house survey focusing on health issues is being compiled. All information for this post is taken from “Mártires del Río Santiago,” a joint publication of IMDEC and Instituto Vida. For a succinct article exploring the pollution and water quality of the river, as well as the health effects, please check our friend Jeff Conant’s article Not a Drop to Drink.
Video of the Week! ”The Story of a Photo Exposition” depicts the history and fruition of the photo exposition “Through the Eyes of Children.” The kids in La Huizachera not only took the photos, but were involved in each step of creating their exposition. We hope you enjoy it, we certainly had fun helping out. If you’d like to read and see more, Jess wrote a great post on the photo exposition’s debut and the kids’ reflections and we created a video looking at the world “Through the Eyes of Mauro.” El video está en Español también. ¡Disfrútalo!
How do you tell a story? Yes, it is a simple question, but we are finding out it is not a simple answer. How to tell a story is a question we are exploring in the workshops we are coordinating in Juanacátlan and debating amongst ourselves as we begin shaping our documentary more decisively. We are entering the third week of our first round of Flip Video workshops, reflecting on the direction of our workshops, and meeting with wise IMDEC popular educators to shape its future. The enthusiasm and material generated by our workshop participants so far is incredible, and we are more impressed and inspired each time we meet.
So far, we agree upon this much about what comprises a story: A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. With any luck, it has a climax and a revealing contrast. The good ones possess a twinkle, a raw emotion, and/or something we hold onto and want to share with others. If you are interested in reading more from a master, I recommend “Ira Glass’s Radio Manifesto.” A good friend and collaborator, Becca, is also exploring how to tell a story visually with youth in Hyderabad, India, and I highly recommend checking out her approach.
In the spirit of community and communication, we made an introduction video for Steve to meet IMDEC. Let me just say, we had a lot of fun with it. We have been playing around with our Flip Cameras and iMovie to prepare for our workshops in Juanacátlan, so we made the video with those tools. Tomorrow we have our second video workshop with a group of high schoolers and we look forward to seeing the footage they have taken and introducing storytelling and editing techniques. We are designing the workshop to be popular education based, and look forward to its co-evolution with the participation of our students.
Equipment, Milestones, Relationships | sarah | 
8 March 2010 18:20 | 
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