“Getting to know H2O" is a video collaboration between UC Riverside's Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts and National Science Foundation Water SENSE Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program (IGERT). Mary Gauvain, CHASS Distinguished Professor of Psychology, is a developmental psychologist and was Principal Investigator on the IGERT award.

Created by graduate students in the Gluck and IGERT fellows programs, the video dispels myths about where water comes from and presents ways to protect water. The video won first place in its class and 2nd place overall in a field of 85 films in August at the Committee on Environmental Improvement environmental film festival, hosted by the American Chemical Society.

The Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts is a fellowship geared towards creating new opportunities for community engagement through the arts via the performances and creations of students from the Departments of Art, Creative Writing, Dance, History of Art, Music, Theatre, the Sweeney Art Gallery, and UCR/California Museum of Photography, according to the program’s website. The program gave Gluck Fellow Merideth Hillbrand, an artist, and undergraduate Gluck Fellow J.C. Leapman fellowships to work on this project with IGERT, consisting of CHASS, BCOE, and CNAS fellows.

Gluck assistant director Christine Geerlings Leapman is excited about the collaboration.

“We match Gluck fellows - exceptional CHASS students who have talents, abilities and the desire to be teaching artists - with opportunities that are mutually beneficial to our fellows and the public,” Leapman said. “We were thrilled to be able to make this match between Merideth Hillbrand and the IGERT fellows.”

Merideth Hillbrand, who graduated from UCR in 2019 with a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art, was the filmmaker who directed, edited, and was the camera person for the film. Even though working in educational videos was unfamiliar to her, she took joy in using her expertise to work with people from other disciplines to create a video about water.

Hillbrand worked with 9 graduate students, all affiliated with IGERT, who served not only as writers and presenters on the film, but also as grips and stagehands.  These fellows were Michael Bentel, Scott Coffin, Stacia Dudley, Daniel Harmon, Todd Luce, Parisa Parsafar, Samuel Patton, Parsa Saffarinia and Carolyn Schutten. It was the most people Hillbrand had ever worked with on a film.

“They helped me understand that video is such a fluid medium,” she said. “With this, it lends itself to working easily with others. It was really fun to take my video art background and make an educational video.”

“The nine of us fellows at the time were looking to create a project that capped the end of our fellowship,” said IGERT Fellow Michael Bentel. “We’d first conceived an idea about a book about our research. We saw that it might not only be time-consuming, but also not as approachable for the modern student. So, we took a different route into YouTube informational videos.”

All nine fellows wrote the script, with the fellows' expertise representing their major contribution: Harmon and Parsafar contributed significantly to the psychological aspects of the film, Luce and Schutten to the historical content, Coffin and Saffarinia to the ecological context, Bentel and Patton to the chemical treatment of water, and Dudley focused on water consumption with regards to food production.

Over the summer, Bentel submitted “Getting to Know H2O” into the American Chemical Society's’ film festival, where the film took second place in the overall show competition. 

Scott Coffin, Ph.D hopes that the momentum for this video continues into further outreach.“The IGERT team hopes that the ‘Getting to Know H2O’ provides people with an understanding of how precious and amazing our water is, and inspires people to help preserve this limited resource so that it may provide nourishment for future generations and ecosystems.”

“Getting to Know H2O” and accompanying study guide, which is intended to be an educational resource for all ages, can be found by following this link: https://gluckprogram.ucr.edu/glucktv-steam-channel

FEATURED PHOTO. Photo courtesy of Scott Coffin.
The Water SENSE IGERT Fellows engage in applied research that can improve water quantity and quality.