Gold Medals Go to CGU Videos in This Year’s CASE Awards

CGU has been awarded top honors in two categories in this year’s awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, District VII.

A highly competitive region that includes CGU’s peer institutions in the Southwest and along the West Coast, this year’s District VII judges awarded CGU with a gold medal and Grand Gold medal for videos produced by Anthony Penta, the university’s director of video production. The Grand Gold medal signifies the highest achievement awarded in district competition.

Penta is the past recipient of a 2016 Emmy Award (Chicago/Midwest region) for a video about octopus genome and intelligence research which he created as a member of the production team at the University of Chicago, and also the recipient of a 2015 Emmy Award (Boston/Northeast region) for his short documentary about the sculptor Bill Thompson. These are his first CASE awards as a member of CGU’s Office of Marketing & Communications.

See below for a description of each winning entry and to watch each video.

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Grand Gold Medal: Video Fundraising category

“A New Vision of Healthcare”

Complex health challenges require complex responses. No single discipline or field can do this: What’s needed is a multidisciplinary approach that brings together public health researchers, public policy specialists, technologists, and more to address the challenges holistically.

“A New Vision of Healthcare” was produced by Penta as a fundraising video used to cultivate donor support for a new effort at CGU—as part of a health research initiative spearheaded by President Len Jessup—to concentrate campus researchers along with outside partners in a new space on campus: the Huntley Bookstore, which has served as the central bookstore of The Claremont Colleges for 50 years.

The video–which incorporates drone footage as well as the creation of a watercolor painting of the Huntley by Director of Digital Strategy Hollis Cooper (MFA, ’06)—has been used by the university’s fundraising function to garner support for the purchase of the building.

Gold Medal: Video News and Research category

“Excavation at Akko”

Akko, Israel, is rich archeological ground that’s been trod by many of history’s greatest figures—Richard the Lionheart and Saladin among them. Every summer, since 2010, under the auspices of CGU’s School of Arts & Humanities, a cohort of CGU faculty and students—along with colleagues from other schools – have been engaged in field excavation work there to recover much of this ancient history.

Penta created an in-house video about this unique field experience that illustrates the university’s transdisciplinary philosophy in action. The Akko dig operates on the inclusive idea of transdisciplinary study: It is open to all CGU students, whether they’re getting an MBA or an MFA (you don’t have to be an archeology major to be eligible).

Penta produced the video with the help of religion doctoral student Genie Deez, who traveled with the CGU team to Akko in the summer of 2019 and captured excavation footage later combined with on-campus interviews conducted by Penta.