Six Videos for Outside the Classroom

This fall we produced six short outreach videos for the Alcohol Prevention Coalition run by Outside the Classroom. The videos incorporate Coalition member interviews with footage from their Annual Research Summit to explain the value of Coalition membership to higher education institutions.

It was a lot of fun working with this very well-organized group. And they were very pleased with the result. According to Brandon Busteed, Founder and CEO of Outside The Classroom, “Julie has an amazing vision for storytelling. She was able to connect with our clients, make them comfortable on camera, and capture incredibly thoughtful testimonials about partnering with our organization. The videos that she produced for us were viewed hundreds of times within the first few weeks of posting them on our website. They are more valuable than any piece of marketing collateral.”

Shifting the Public Health Paradigm

We have recently completed a long-term documentation project for the Center for Health Equity and Social Justice at the Boston Public Health Commission. We spent over a year filming communities across New England in their work to decrease the disparities in health outcomes among residents of different ethnic and racial groups.

Our final video presents the Center's unique approach to collaborating with communities. Going beyond traditional "behavior modification" strategies, this approach includes an emphasis on mobilizing residents, addressing racism and the social determinants of health, and advancing long-term policy and systems change. It's about promoting social justice to improve public health.

Earlier this year, we also produced a trailer for the Center, with highlights from this video. Congratulations to the Center and their grantee partners for all their important work!

BU Student Film Audition

My Production I class at Boston University will be holding auditions for their final films this week:

Thursday, October 28, 5-8pm
640 Commonwealth Ave, Room 100
Boston, MA

We are seeking actors and actresses of all ages to perform in fifteen 3-6 minute films. Shooting will take place November 9-18 and will involve 1 or 2 shoots per film. This is an unpaid gig, but we will provide food and a copy of the finished film.

Please email buprod353@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Housing Choice Video

The Maine Affordable Housing Coalition, in collaboration with several other organizations, has just released a powerful video sharing the stories of several families whose lives have been changed by public housing support.

The piece, Along the Way Home, aims to bring public attention to the housing needs of lower income people and highlight successful models for addressing those needs. It was produced by Maine-based Pull-Start Pictures, and can be seen on YouTube or on its website.

Please help spread the word about this video and its important message.

Monkey Dance in Peterborough, NH

Monkey Dance will be screening at the Mariposa Museum and World Culture Center on Friday, October 22 at 7pm as part of a special exhibit on the cultures of Southeast Asia.

Rooftop Films Rocks!

I had a great time with the Under Water's Mercy team watching trailers from 20 great projects - narrative and documentary - that were part of the IFP Independent Filmmaker Labs  this summer.

The docs were especially strong, including Dear Mandela, about three young slum dwellers who refuse to be evicted from their homes in one of Durban's sprawling shantytowns; 25 to Life, about an HIV-positive man who seeks redemption from the women of his promiscuous past; and Smokin' Fish, about a young Tlingit Indian man who makes a pilgrimage to rural Alaska to spend a summer living off the land.

The show was part of IFP Film Week, and was put on outdoors along the Hudson River in New York City by Rooftop Films. I had barely heard of Rooftop Films before this, and now I'm a huge fan! "Underground Movies Outdoors"... we hope we'll have a chance to screen Under Water's Mercy this way when we're done.

It has been a productive and fun week at IFP's Independent Film Week - a real powerhouse of an event.

Last Train Home

I just got home from seeing Lixin Fan's Last Train Home, which follows one family among the 130 million migrant factory workers in China. It's a powerful film which manages to capture something of the broad sweep of humanity and the intimate struggles of this one family. It did seem a bit contrived at times, but I recognize the challenges of filming in China and certainly forgive the filmmakers for doing what they did to knit together their story.

The film was showing at the Brattle Theatre as the last of this season's Docyard screenings, which help build our Boston documentary filmmaking community. After the screening, the filmmaker skyped in for a Q&A (pictured above).

It was great reconnecting with old friends, including Jesse Shapins, a PhD student at the Harvard Graduate Student of Design who is also an urban media theorist, documentary artist, and social entrepreneur. When I worked at Harvard's Film Study Center last year, we helped Jesse and his classmate Olga Touloumi curate A Media Archaeology of Boston - which pulled together media representations of the Boston area landscape over the last 100+ years. Thanks to all their effort, it was a great show - ranging from stuttery 1901 movies of Boston streetcars, to cheesy 1980s fiction films, to a black-and-white documentary on the Boston Marathon and a promotional video featuring the mayor of Somerville jogging through the city streets.

Jesse has just started co-teaching A Media Archaeology of Place, which looks to be a fascinating course "exploring different modes of representing place." I'm looking forward to seeing the final output of this class, which will be accessible to the public on a map-based website.