The coming of videotape, cheaper and more flexible than film, transformed the production and distribution of moving images, and political activists were among the first to recognise its potential. The Story of British Video Activism is the first book-length account of this vitally innovative but unjustly neglected filmmaking. Ed Webb-Ingall traces the democratising impact of portable video recording technology from the late 1960s to the early 21st century. He introduces pioneering and dynamic videomakers from John 'Hoppy' Hopkins to Liberation Films and Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, showing how video played a powerful role in local and national campaigns on issues including housing, labour struggles and racial justice. This book reveals the grassroots radicalism of generations of video activists who put cameras in the hands of campaigners and marginalised groups to equip them to challenge authority and fight for tangible change. Close-Ups highlight innovative hardware and campaigns from the miners' strike to AIDS activism. Webb-Ingall shows that the spirit of analogue videotape lives on in today's digital video activism. Ed Webb-Ingall , PhD, is a filmmaker and independent researcher working with archival materials and methodologies drawn from community video. He collaborates with groups to explore under-represented historical moments and their relationship to contemporary life. He has written for LUX , MIRAJ and Focaal , and had exhibitions of his work shown at GOMA, Glasgow, South London Gallery, MK Gallery and Studio Voltaire. MARK DUGUID is a senior curator at the BFI National Archive, with overall responsibility for the online representation of archival film and television. He is the author of the BFI TV Classic on Cracker (2009), and co-editor of Ealing Revisited (BFI, 2012). He has written features and reviews for Sight & Sound magazine and is a contributor to the International Encyclopedia of Television. Patrick Russell is Senior Curator (Non-Fiction Film and Television), BFI National Archive, UK. He is the author of 100 British Documentaries (2007) and co-editor of The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon (BFI 2004) and Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (2010) and has been a regular contributor to BFI Screenonline.