Digital Arts Service Corps - youth media

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?

Month 10: IMC Fest & A Return to Research

Stephen Fonzo — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:18:53 +0000

April-May started with the IMC Fest, three days of music featuring nearly 30 local performers and an art show in partnership with the Champaign-Urbana Boneyard Arts Festival. I was stage manager and worked with volunteer stage and sound techs, as well as artists, to keep us on schedule and make sure everything was working. The event, which was great fun and raised money for our organization, was largely planned and organized by Dan Blah, our VISTA Supervisor at the IMC. The weekend gave us a chance to promote the IMC, attract new members, and support the thriving artistic community here in C-U.

On the training side, I offered three sessions - one on WordPress; one on radio automation (using ZaraRadio); and one on live sound. For those curious about live sound, you will see by searching the Internet that most training guides or courses are not free. Here are some links to free information to get you started: Basic Introduction by Lou Gross; sound reinforcement system article on Wikipedia; and mixing article from Wikipedia.

Nearly everything else this month has been about preparing for the summer. For the IMC as a whole, this has meant the recruiting of over a dozen summer youth positions, funded through the Champaign Consortium and organized by Nicole, while making internal space and institutional improvements for staff and guests. For me, this has meant getting ready for my last two months as a CTC*VISTA and working towards leaving a useful legacy in media training documentation. So far this year, I have offered dozens on hands-on workshops, helped to create and organize two large fundraisers, built partnerships with other local organizations, formalized working group procedures, and updated and suggested improvements to the IMC's production facilities, all of which have involved networking and collaborating and spending long hours at the IMC working with others. Throughout the course of these last ten months, I have kept detailed notes and drafted some training materials, but seldom have had the time to sit down and compile it all. So, from now until mid-July I will be working more independently on creating and archiving training documents, and have already begun doing more research to this end.

During April and May I did most of the substantive budget and curriculum development for the first session of the Don Moyers Boys & Girls Club's Teen Computer Lab program, which will begin in June. This has included outlining computer workstation and media peripheral specifications (with guidance from VISTA Leader Josh King), compiling training materials and exercises, organizing meetings of team partners, and researching new and innovative technologies, especially Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) for use in the lab.

Here are just a few links that I have found to be very helpful in my research and documentation:
- List of open source software packages
- FLOSS Manuals
- The OSSWin Project: Open Source for Windows

There is much more available, but those are decent places to start.

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!)

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!

A rewarding VISTA moment

Julie Adler — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:04:44 +0000

Earlier this week, I returned to New England from a trip I took with my family to Mexico for my cousin's wedding. While I was away, my videojournalism club at Cambridge Educational Access was supposed to produce the fourth episode of their recently inaugurated newscast, Youth View Cambridge. Now, don't get me wrong -- I wanted very much for the newscast to take place without me (capacity-building!), but when I heard that it didn't, it reminded me that at least I was truly an integral part of the organization. However, I wasn't feeling warm & fuzzy yet; no, it wasn't until we were short an anchor for the show and 16-year old Fredeline came prancing in after-school:

"Fredeline, are you anchoring?" I asked as I exited the studio and approached her. But she didn't hear my question, or at least she didn't respond to it. Instead, her face broke out into a huge grin: "JULIE! You're back!!!!"

We hugged, and she kept talking excitedly: "Betty said you emailed her and I said 'No, Julie's in Mexico!'"

I explained that I had gotten back the day before.

"The show fell apart without you here. We need you!" Fredeline said, or something to that effect.

And I think I'll replay that moment for awhile, a) because it was awesome, and b) to remind me that by this time next year, someone else should be in my role, hearing those same words. (And props to Fredeline, who wasn't planning to anchor that day, but came through for us because we needed her.)

View some of the first episodes of YVC online at www.cpsd.us/ceatv/yvc.htm

post-austin

Sarah Pierantoni — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:51:44 +0000

The NAMAC conference was an experience. It was great to reconnect with CTC VISTA Project peeps, learn about new media arts happenings and experience a great new city. It is hard to say how the conference was overall. Each panel was completely different from the next, and hardly seemed related to the previous one. Some I attended hardly seemed related to anything I am working on at my organization, but still interesting to learn about. Being in a temporary volunteer position at a media arts organization, I attended this conference as an observer, quietly deciding if this is really what I am interested in and thinking about where the media arts could fall in my life path. This description of the conference applies to the back of my mind. The front of my mind got inspired to create Spanish camera classes to add to our curriculum, after attending a Latino media art panel. At this panel we (my supervisor and I) networked with an independent Latina filmmaker and discussed screening her film at our theater. She is interested in making an appearance, which would really turn the film showing into an event. Exciting and in the works. Texas is cool.

I am currently working on a gig at another middle school with the MOLLIE project. It has honestly felt like I am on a game show. We pile into a van loaded with video equipment and road trip it out to a school. We show up, the kids get pumped and greet us with helping hands. The topic of the video is unknown right up until the clock starts running. I meet these young people, and have 1.5 hours to interpret their storyboards, create a set with any resource I can find in the classroom, create a short storyline and remember to include newly learned facts about things such as volcanoes, earthquakes, surface water, anything that falls under the broad topic of earth science. While trying to envision the end product I am in charge of overseeing that every kid gets their hands on the cameras and mics, and that they learned a bit about production. At the end of the 1.5, a new group comes in and we do it all over again. It is a quick three hours.

I split my time between the education department and the Wealthy Theater. Duties at the Wealthy Theater are increasing. I have become the go-to girl for lighting info. I am currently working on a database for all of our lighting equipment that has been sitting and not accounted for for the past however many years. I am researching new equipment, and creating new light scenes for any event we may have in the future. I run the light board for every event we put on. There is no manual for our board, and I spend a lot of my time researching and testing to get things right. It is slow and grueling at times, but it feels great to go to work and be in self-learning mode. My goal is to have a manual ready for any new member or staff person to come in and look at to learn the lighting skills and help out with community events. Curriculum for a lighting class is in the future, too. I was also recently brought on board to the administrative team of the theater. I help with securing future events, which is necessary to sustain the life of the theater. We are currently battling with the GR police department to obtain a club license. If we win, this will ensure a longer lifespan for us.

Things are busy, and good. Happy Monday!

Hey Danielle here are your links.

Will Quinones — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:56:57 +0000

I work for Reel Works Teen Filmmaking. its a great youth media organization. I learned about Reel Works two years ago when i was an "At Risk" kid In High School. they helped me make two award winning films. we recently blew away an online youth media competition at Listenup.org. oh yea, we are having a screening on the 24th. if anyone is in the New York area and wants to see our latest movies. email me at will@reelworks.org. thanks.

you can find our work on these sites

http://Reelworks.org

http://Listenup.org

http://uthtv.com

http://movies.aol.com/truestories/reelworks

Teen Digital Storymapping Workshop in Lower Roxbury

danielle martin — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:58:12 +0000

I just finished a digital storytelling and mapping workshop that included over 10 youth who stayed creative and excited to share their stories even in 90 degree heat without AC! It's a project I've been working on pretty much since the beginning of this VISTA year, by meeting with folks from the Lower Roxbury Empowerment Coalition, a group of housing developments and non-profit programs who are trying to create inter-neighborhood partnerships and tap into Northeastern University outreach programs. Jayme Bonds, who works tirelessly at Mandela Homes, participated in one of my train-the-trainers this spring and got pretty adamant about me working with youth leaders from her summer programs. We decided to open it up to as many local housing development summer programs as we could get together, and it worked out well. We even got a couple participants from Worcester!

I gathered some MassIMPACT folks and got Colleen Kelly, now former CTC VISTA and employee at Emerson College, to come help facilitate. The group of youth were all girls except for one, well spoken young man George, who all had interesting and personal stories to share. It was a big group for a digital storytelling workshop (over 15 folks working on stories at once) but it worked out fine to split the group into two story circles and we had enough experienced storytellers floating around to help with the one-on-one support. Several of the youth also really excelled at the technical side, so they were finished with their stories by the beginning of the third day. So we had them publish their stories on StoriesForChange.net and help build the Google Map...and then show others how to do it as well. We're hoping to do a few follow-up two-hour workshops over the summer to help support these youth in their quest to teach digital storytelling to other younger residents.

I also owe big thanks to Royal and Paulette at Camfield Estates for hosting, and for Jayme Bonds from Mandela Homes for providing the food. The final stories are posted at StoriesforChange.net http://storiesforchange.net/event/teen_digital_storymapping_bootcamp and all linked off the Google Map at http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=1015076548696853...
There's also more photos on Flickr.

I hope this is a blog

Will Quinones — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:51:13 +0000

hey everyone, its been a while. I think i start every blog with "its been a while since i wrote a blog" haha. well i'm a busy man. It's not easy working full time, making such a large sum of money and trying to find places to spend it all. HEY i think the greatest thing i did this year was go to the Sundance film festival. i met a funder from Adobe and spoke to him, showed him some stuff from Reel Works. a couple of months later he invited us to apply for a fifty thousand dollar grant. i'm still crossing my fingers. we should hear the news this month. another cool thing i've been doing is helping kids make movies. I've helped produced about twenty short films this year. I think. Well some are still in the works. regardless show us some love at listenup.org. A few of our films are in a contest for cool prizes, including mine. please write a review and rate our movies. (especially mine) it would be much apreciated. here's the link. Mine is called "The Beginning" i wrote and shot it, in one day. its cool i guess.

http://www.listenup.org/community/org.php?org=7bc96f311c8e6a38ac5a296e3f...