Teddy bears take on tech-savvy teens

It was a terrifying sight: a vengeful teddy bear chasing high school students down the sidewalk in downtown Cincinnati. If you attended the 90th Annual Reds Opening Day parade this year, you might have caught a glimpse of the bizarre scene near the corner of Race Street and Central Parkway, against the backdrop of high school bands and parade floats.

Well, don't worry, it was only a movie.

A teddy bear attack at the Opening Day parade was just one of the concoctions of the Clark Montessori High School Film Intersession: two dozen students in two teams were put in charge of writing, directing, shooting, editing, and producing a film, all in just two weeks during the school's annual intersession. Each group drew a genre out of a hat, and then had two weeks to work together and complete their film, with the help of teachers and Media Bridges education staff. For one group, that meant staging a scene during the rainy, 35 degree parade.

The student camera crew joined several other camera crews outside of Media Bridges, which were covering the parade live for local cable. The parade begins at Findlay Market in Over the Rhine, and moves down Race Street toward the Ohio River and the baseball stadium, passing in front of our community media center on the way. Some of the youth filmmakers had the opportunity to work with the professional and volunteer field production crews that were broadcasting the parade live from Media Bridges.

You can find out what happened with the teddy bears on the youth channel this month in the two Clark Montessori Intersession Films: Teddy, a sci-fi trailer for a movie about terrorizing teddy bears, and Unspoken Love, a cyberspace romance that shows how appearances can be deceiving.

(The film intersession was a program I worked on this month and wrote about in this article for the Media Bridges monthly newsletter. It was a fun project that turned out really well. Updates on some of the other things going on with the youth channel are on the way!)

Comment from Denise Cheng on May 1, 2009 - 7:50pm

cute! will they be available online?

Comment from Elizabeth Goussetis on May 4, 2009 - 2:19pm

Thanks for asking! I'm working on it right now, actually. I just set up a profile on Vimeo for the youth channel, and those two videos will be up soon!

Comment from Elizabeth Goussetis on May 22, 2009 - 8:34am

Update: the two videos, as well as several other youth channel projects, are posted on the Vimeo page. You can also find them on the youth channel page on the Media Bridges website.