Digital Arts Service Corps - Media Bridges

In the merry, merry month of May...

Elizabeth Goussetis — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:25:35 +0000

I wrapped up a 20-week long after-school outreach I’ve been teaching at an elementary school. I worked with two groups of students: the older group made a documentary about the experiences of their classmates who have moved to the U.S. from other countries, and the younger group made a collection of short instructional videos on topics of their choice (drawing, making a paper airplane, counting to ten in Japanese, making farting noises with your armpit, etc.).

Both videos were screened for parents at the after-school program’s year-end showcase. The kids were excited to see themselves on the screen, and it was really cool to talk to all the parents whose kids appeared in the film or who worked on it.

But the highlight of the month was taking a group of kids to a fancy, televised awards ceremony.

The Blue Chip Cable Access Awards are given out each year to recognize the work of volunteer producers of cable access programs in Greater Cincinnati. A short documentary made by one of last summer’s video camps I helped with at Media Bridges was nominated in the “student K-5” category. So, I rounded up the kids and parents to go to the award ceremony, which was held at a grand old restored movie theater. When their group was announced as the winner, I ushered a bunch of mostly shy kids up on stage, where they all got big rounds of applause for their acceptance speeches. One girl’s was, “Thank you, people.”

Here's the group photo, complete with shiny award plaque: http://ctcvista.org/files/IMG_7496b.JPG

Both events were good reminders of how important it is to follow through on projects that involve people in creating media. If we want people to realize the power their voices can have through media, we should involve them in the distribution, not just the production. When you put a piece of media “out there,” others will see it, and that is an important media literacy lesson. I see a lot of light bulbs turn on when kids see other people reacting to their work, whether those people are their parents or an entire theater full of people. Distributing one’s work can be an encouraging ego boost, but it can also be humbling and intimidating. Either way, it promotes responsible media-making.

The award-winning documentary was about an awesome, kid-friendly art museum where you can touch and interact with the artwork. It is called the UnMuseum, and it is housed in Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center. You can see the video in the youth section of the Media Bridges Web site.

Those of you looking to hone your armpit farting skills will have to wait. I haven’t been able to put those videos up yet. One problem that we constantly have with younger groups is that the instructor always ends up having to do additional editing after the outreach or class is over. Does anyone has a good model for this or any advice?

Teddy bears take on tech-savvy teens

Elizabeth Goussetis — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:34:03 +0000

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!)

Piece by piece

Elizabeth Goussetis — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:38:29 +0000

The Youth Channel is online! Or rather, evidence of the Youth Channel’s existence is online. But that’s pretty exciting. It's one of the small but encouraging pieces that seem to be coming together with the Youth Channel.

We just revamped the Media Bridges website, and the new one is clean and easy to use. The old one looked like it was from 1994, and there was no mention of the Youth Channel. On our new site, I created a page of info about the youth channel and posted our meetings on the Web site calendar. In the next few weeks I’m hoping to set up a blog feature on the Web site so we can add updates about the Youth Channel and announce current projects and ways kids can get involved. Also, we have a Twitter account! We’ll see how that goes. You can follow us; our name is CincyYouthTV.

Currently airing on our Youth Channel time slot are several youth-produced videos from the Mobile Film School in Austin, Texas. Thanks, Amy! If anyone else has youth-produced videos they wouldn't mind having on TV in Cincinnati, please send them my way.

We have several shows in production. Whether this is my doing, or just happened without my help, or a combination, I don’t know. An adult producer here is working with kids from a performing arts high school on an entertainment show, one of our interns is putting together a youth talk show, and a middle school club is planning a regular talk show about manners (yes, manners). I also have a high school student finishing a documentary project, and I am working on a documentary with students at a local elementary school.

I am also having an opportunity every week for kids to come to orientation for the Youth Channel. The goal is to get kids in the door and show them how they can get involved at Media Bridges. I’m hoping that this will help get more youth involved at Media Bridges, hopefully some who can be peer leaders in the future.

We are starting to talk about plans for our summer camp program, which we do every year, but the funding situation is kind of up in the air, so we can’t plan too much. The program we’re hoping to do will be pretty awesome, and I’m excited about it.

An Earth Day for the Internet

Elizabeth Goussetis — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:23:22 +0000

Way back in September, I organized an event at Media Bridges for the third-annual One Web Day, which is a cool event that some of your organizations might be interested in participating in.

One Web Day is a sort of “Earth Day for the Internet,” that was celebrated Sept. 22 with virtual and in-person events in cities across the country to promote a free and open internet. The goal is to help people understand the possibilities the internet can offer to them, and motivate people to protect it as a public resource.

“People's lives now are as dependent on the Internet as they are on the basics like roads, energy supplies and running water," One Web Day founder Susan Crawford said in a news release. "We can no longer take that for granted and we must advocate for the Internet politically, and support its vitality personally."

This year's theme was the internet and its effect on democratic participation in an election year. So we planned a panel discussion on the topic of “The Next President, the Internet, and the Disconnected City,” where people in Cincinnati could talk directly to the presidential candidates’ telecommunications policy advisors, via Skype. We invited representatives from the Obama, McCain and Nader campaigns. Since Media Bridges is a non-partisan public access station, I hoped our event could include discussions of more candidates’ positions, but unfortunately the McCain and Nader campaigns could not send representatives.

Our lone panelist was Obama’s telecommunications advisor Gigi Sohn, who phoned in from Washington D.C. and we projected her image onto a projector screen. Our audience was small but enthusiastic, and included some students, cable access producers, bloggers, media activists, a lawyer, and one 11-year old.

Despite the 11-year-old, the event had nothing to do with my job developing the youth media program, but it was a good event planning practice and experience using some of the internet tools. We incorporated the internet in everything we did for the event, which was tedious and scary for me, but my fellow (non-CTC) VISTA Katie did the web work and patiently explained it to me. We downloaded a program that allowed us to record the video and audio from Skype (we had to pay for it but I’d be interested to know if anyone knows of free versions out there), and posted the entire event to a One Web Day page we created using WordPress. The page also has a video from interviews we did with people at the downtown farmer’s market, where we asked people how they used the internet and what they’d like to see the new president do.

A Swing State Update

Elizabeth Goussetis — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:58:49 +0000

This story takes place in Ohio. I know some of you coastal VISTAs are longing for more Ohio news and charming Midwestern commentary, like you were getting before the election. Perfect timing for me to wake from my procrastination hibernation and write my very first field report!

I am serving as Youth Channel Facilitator at Media Bridges www.mediabridges.org, a community media center that operates Cincinnati’s four public access television stations. My job is to develop a youth media program that will allow Cincinnati youth (ages 12-25) to run Media Bridges’ youth channel. The youth channel, called the Youth Block, airs youth-created programming on Media Bridges’ education channel. Part of my job is to acquire 10 hours each week of programming to be played on our Youth Block (currently we have about four hours), and to develop a plan for volunteer youth to run the Youth Block.

Our goal is that youth who participate in the program will learn the tools to understand how media represents youth and constructs messages which affect them. We hope that students will gain the confidence and ability to use video and radio production skills to represent themselves and get their voices out to the community.

My first month here I worked with the kids in our summer video and radio camp. Each class finishes with the production of a video or radio show by the kids. Right now, the summer media camp is the only established youth program at Media Bridges, and a primary source of our Youth Block programming, so I am hoping to expand on that. I’ve also been taking crash courses in all the cool technology toys we have here: I’ve learned to use a video camera, operate studio cameras, lighting and sound equipment, run a live studio show, and edit digital video. Yay!

The past few months have been spent researching existing youth media programs in other cities and meeting with local organizations that work with youth in order to build partnerships and get the word out about the Youth Block. In September I organized an event for One Web Day at Media Bridges (http://mediabridges.org/onewebday/). In October, I attended the Alliance for Community Media Central States Region conference and I also supervised a high school student who interned with me for a week as part of a senior project. In November I have been helping to revamp Media Bridges’ volunteer program to help recruit younger volunteers, and I am taking a proposal writing course online and working on writing grant proposals.

That’s just the basics, but stay tuned for more lively and detailed reports from the heartland as I get caught up on my field report quota. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

VISTA's working together

Richard T. Anderson — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:47:19 +0000

This past week I took some time off and went to visit my friends, Darrin and Courtney in Cincinnati Ohio. Before I left I let Lauren Bratslavsky at Media Bridges know that I'd be in town., so that we could possibly get together.

After a few emails and phone calls Lauren and I decided to meet Friday at Media Bridges at 12:30. I walked in and really liked the building. It's one of these refurbished old buildings and just has a neat look. Lauren met me and showed me around.

They recently got new iMacs for their edit suites and such. They were smart enough to make sure they had DVD burners. Unlike the new mini editing lab here at the CMC. Over all I was impressed by the facility and the people I met.

It turned out that they have a second VISTA, Kathy Dumas, there as well. The three of us walked to a Deli for lunch. We had a spirit discussion about being a VISTA, problems facing Community Media, patriarchy, lax direction, and other stuff. It seems that VISTA's at Media Bridges do not get made to feel like they are part of the staff, as I do here in Grand Rapids.

After lunch we returned to Media Bridges. One thing we talked about was the program Garageband. I had put together a tutorial on it and they had some questions about it. So we went upstairs and I gave them an overview of how the program works. We made a little VISTA music piece. It is rather odd. lol.

Lauren gave me some assitance with the program Livetype, which we've had trouble with here at the CMC.

It was a great visit. Both relaxing and productive. VISTA's communicating and working together. I hope I get the chance to show them around the Community Media Center here sometime. I just emailed them my tutorial for Garageband and I will probably hear back from them with more info on Livetype and a program for ripping DVD's.

Peace,

Rich