A Book Launch, A Gorilla Trek and Kids as Animators.

This Friday morning, if you are near your computer, tune into Scholastic, Inc’s website.  Scholastic Inc. is launching a new book here, and simulcasting the launch party over the web, from their auditorium in New York City. Insiders at Scholastic say this is one of the biggest launches since Harry Potter. Looking for Miza is the book.

Releasing a book today is almost like starting a new media channel. Not only will viewers of the launch party hear from the book’s authors, but they will also be able to read pages from the book, submit questions, find teacher resources, suggest solutions to the problems facing an endangered species, donate money to help the character in the book, join a “watch” community, and view animated movies made about the book, by kids from around the world.

What’s best about this story is that it is true. A real story, out of Africa.

At our house, we are especially excited about this release. Two of my boys and I spent June in Rwanda Africa with the book’s authors, workshopping animation with kids in Rwanda, and tromping around in the volcanic mountains with the Gorillas. I had the incredible pleasure to help the kids of Rwanda learn the craft of animation by producing two “gorillasodes” with young people a the Rwanda Cinema Center. The “gorillasodes” are now availble to view at www.miza.com. Look for them at the bottom of the page. They knocked it out of the national park!

Check out this Friday’s simulcast at 10:00am EST. You just may see us at the Gorillasode premiere at the the first ever Kids Gorilla Summit!

60 Young Filmmakers Freshly Minted – For Free

The New York Times was there last night at the Burns Film Center in Westchester New York, to see what all the excitement was about.

Soon came the stretch limos, the long yellow stretch limos, to launch 60 newly minted animators onto the red carpet for the world premiers of their short films. The kids milked it for all they could, saundering, posing, laughing, What a party!

I stood there clapping and whistling with the throng of photographers, screaming parents, and passers-by who were part of the spectacle. Joy, Cheer, Satisfaction, Respect, and Awe filled my being. My chest swelled with pride, as it has dozens of times before. All the training, editing, supporting, cajoling, and threatening was worth it. I had the privledge, a few years ago, to design this animation program for Burns, to help underserved 4th grade classrooms learn how to tell stories with video. We called it: Animation: Minds in Motion! Now I’ve helped Burns produce 14 festivals just like this one, and it always feels the same.

The Burns Film Center gets it. As does the Tribeca Film Institute. As does The Rwanda Cinema Center. As does USC’s dept. of Communication. As does Manahattanville College of Arts. As does Muhlenberg College’s New Film Program. As does the Academy of International Studies in Connecticut and NYU. As do many other programs for kids I’ve had the humbling opportunity to consult upon visual education principles. They envision the future of media education. They know giving kids relevant media education and experiences will boost the global competitiveness and the core life-skills of the next generation.

Kids today are rabid consumers of media from screens, but they have never learned to “produce” or “direct” their own content for these screens. They are more effected by the persuasible efforts of mainstream, on-screen media than by books, yet the ability to persuade and express via reading and writing, speaking and listening is the only literacy they are taught as “valid” in our schools.

That is why the Burns Film Center gets it.  They put the kid’s visual storytelling on a big screen and give the educators a big reason to take visuals seriously.

If I told you I could take your child and in a few short hours, show them how to make their own movie from scratch, and get them a world-wide audience for their movie, along with a walk down the red carpet in front of screaming fans, what would you think this is worth? What do you think would happen to your young filmmaker’s self esteem? What do you think it would do for their confidence?

From experience, I can tell you it reprograms their DNA.

Visual literacy is a stodgy, academic term use by many for what I’m trying to describe, I think this is about much more. This is about integrating all the literacies into powerful ways of expressing and persuading. It is about core life-skills.

You have to see it first hand. I can hardly put it into words. Which is the point. Seeing is part of communicating.

Does it matter to kids? It will be interesting to see how the New York Times describes last night, as we premiered 18 short films for the lucky kids of Westchester.

BTW, this non-profit event was graciously sponsored by local corporations and philanthropies. The kids participated for free.

Take a look:

Broadcast Yourself Already, Not The Man

Ideas that spread are concise, catchy, and tap into shared experience. So when Youtube launched with the subtitle, “Broadcast Yourself” it was a prefect match, the perfect idea for this age. Just like, “1000 songs in your pocket” from Apple’s iPod, Youtube caught the essense of the core benefit to users. The iPod (and iTunes) has scaled to epic proportions – legally.  Youtube, on the other hand, has been retreading, illegally, material from “The Man” – Viacom, Newscorp, GE, and a few other media behemoths. Instead of “Broadcasting Yourself” Youtube’s tag should be “Re-broadcast Back Catalog”.

Viacom (the man) doesn’t think this is funny. “Your people had better broadcast themselves” says the man, holding Youtube to it’s own catchphrase with a fleet of lawyers and forensic CSI (Content Sniffing Interns) teams deep into copyright infringing uploaders who’ve helped themselves to other’s broadcasted material.

In Viacom offices two years ago, I was dazzled by the numbers offered by the MTV/VH1/NIckleodeon people about Youtube. 100,000,000 million downloads for every 65,000 uploads. And of the 65,000 uploads, who knows how many were pre-existing programing from The Man. Most. This was two years ago. This same staff of cutting-edge programming whiz-kids dedicated teams to scouring Youtube for original programming by amateurs. They found very little. And what they did find rarely made it to pilot. Two years later, “user generated content” is a term of the mid 00’s.

Turns out the big “Yourself” is inept at uploading watchable, original content.

BTW, everybody in those Viacom meetings has been fired. They were supposed to create the next Youtube, or use Youtube “Broadcasters” for the next big thing. But the pickin’s – they were slim. The Viacom MAN, in a convoluted convulsion, canned their broadcaster seekers for not finding broadcasters WITHIN their audience.

“Broadcast Yourself” is not as easy as it looks. But it can be learned by the mass of amateurs who’d be the ones the Youtube tagline is targeting. It is basically storytelling 101. Can you tell a story visually? Visual communication has a language all it’s own. Just like the written word, it has syntax, vocabulary, juxtiposition, design, color, and themes – all blended together to get communication to happen. A quick scan of the webisodes produced by our Youtube rank-and-file shows little grasp of basic respect for viewer time or understanding. Focusing on a subset of uploader, for example video resume posters, many take too long, or tell us they are great before showing us, or are great at what they do, but have no idea about lighting, sound, or composing a scene. Some get it just right in mastering the subtlties of the medium. But when they do, other have no idea how difficult it is to get it just so.

Broadcasting doesn’t have to be great. It has to be respectful of what it takes to communicate visually. Broadcasting is a language. Video is a text. Until we can grasp this fact, the best things on Youtube are/were the things professionals make for TV. So  “Broadcast Yourself” has a double meaning, the second being ‘Broadcast The Man’s Programming Yourself‘ will be the norm until the great ‘Yourself’ learns how to channel a genuine vision speaking the language of film/video. I’ll be posting tips in the next few posts about what basic things can be done to succeed, yourself.

Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives: An object lesson on a commute

Seven years ago, Marc Prensky coined the phrase “Digital natives, Digital immigrants” in an essay by the same name. He asserts our educational system was designed for a different student than the kids who come through the school doors today. Without getting into the finer points, Prensky’s analog is very apt. In a hightech age, Natives (under 18) speak the language of technology more fluently than immigrants (18+) and the educational infrastructure serves the latter, rather than the former.

I live north of New York City, As I travel to and from the city, cell phone service is intermittent at best on the parkways northbound out of the city. These parkways wind through some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the nation.  Why is it that cell phone service can not be facilitated through these corridors of capitalism? I mean Scarsdale(!), Westchester(!), and Greenwich(!) all have serious problems holding a cell signal.

Perhaps people don’t like ugly cell phone towers in their nice neighborhoods?  Perhaps too much investment in legacy infrastructure?  Perhaps most of these residents are Digital Immigrants. Many made their fortunes the old fashioned way; Ivy league school, fortune 500 company, put your head down for 40 years and get a place in the burbs free from the conveniences of modern life.  Who knows, but it is maddening for someone like myself to use copytalk or Jott.com as I travel through this digital wasteland, a place which chooses not to speak the native tongue of the 21st century. (on a side note – when I moved to the NY area seventeen years ago, these same neighborhoods were JUST getting cable tv. In the Western US, cable had been going for 15 years at that time)

Another recent encounter with a Digital Immigrants. I recently sat down with the entire faculty of a communications department at a major Southern university.  Most of the faculty did not have blogs, many did not know know the term ‘podcast’. Many looked down their nose at Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc, and yet these are the ones called to serve the students who ’speak’ these digital technologies in a native tongue.  This was the COMMUNICATIONS department! Like me schlepping through legacy neighborhoods Westchester NY, our student’s literacy in digital things gets ‘dropped’ or ‘tuned’ out when they commute through the legacy neighborhoods of academia, teathered together by tenure.  This certainly is not the case in every school or every wealthy neighborhood, but I found it striking.

The digital native, digital immigrant thing is a spectrum, not a hard and fast pigeon holeable phenominon. I know 65 year old software coders. I also know 22 year-old Luddites. Look around. Are you a native or an immigrant? The contrast can be startling.

Copytalk that, and Jott This Down: Secrets of the Mobile Blogger

If you are your own channel in the digital world, then any technology which makes it easier to spread your ideas and programming will be hotly lusted after. Today I recluctantly give up some secrets which have changed the way I work for ever.

But before I divulge, a short scenario;

You are driving. Slow commute or maybe a long road trip. You go into a semi-somnambulic state, staring mindlessly through your windshield. You get lost in your thoughts. The open loops of your life all present themselves. Soon you have an insight. An idea or a thought strikes like lightning, your mind races, seeing connections, synergies, or problems solved. Perhaps the exact words you should say to a boss, spouse or child come to you on the spot. Perhaps an idea for your next blog post. Perhaps the cure to cancer. Who knows. We’ve all been there. What do you do? If you are like me, in the past I’ve called in my brilliant idea and left a message on my own cell phone, or scribbled incoherent keywords on any paper I could find on the seat next to me.

Last month I had 127 such moments.

Good news is, I have them all in my email inbox under the “brilliant ideas” folder, as text files. And, here’s the best news, I didn’t have to key them in from my voice-mail. I didn’t outsource the keying-in via a virtual assistant or a dictation service, and most importantly I made these notes seconds after the idea presented itself.

This has made all the difference in keeping up on blog posts, on lesson plan ideas, on presentation concepts, and on and on.

My secret weapon? Copytalk.com and Jott.com.  Copytalk allows up to four mintues of speaking at a time, Jott only 15-30 seconds, but both deliver instant notation from a cell phone and the results show up in your inbox within the hour.

Jott.com is designed for short notes, copytalk.com for longer musings. Jott’s basic package is free. Copytalk starts at 80.00 per month.

I’m not getting any affliate cash from promoting these two companies. I’ve used them both variably over the past year and they have changed the way I work. I’ve scratched the surface of what can be done. Other benefits include text to speech, multiple emails broadcasts, transribing of mp3s, etc.

Check it out, and capture the essense of your great ideas as soon they pop into your head.

BTW, this post was created from my cell phone, and tweaked later in email. Nifty, eh?