Pam on What's Digital

The Digital Workshop is a Zeum exhibit that I love. In this room, anyone can take a picture of his or herself and add effects to it in the program, Adobe Photoshop. Then they can add their work to the constantly changing exhibit wall space. (see the pic)

I have been a part of the Zeum team for over three years (!!), and I have enjoyed seeing the steady progress that DW has gone through. We came all the way from our old, floppy disk carrying, ancient cameras to brand new fancy shmancy apple isight cameras. Pretty GOOD DEAL.

Yes. The DW is a room of wonder. I, personally am interested in photography, so it is fun to observe how people take their pictures and edit them. I have been able to experience so many things in DW. Apart from being able to take my own pictures and play around with Photoshop myself, I get to work with the public and help them move through the space and learn about digital photo imaging for the first time often.

I feel like when I am working in DW, I am not just watching over the room, but I get to develop my teaching skills as well. Besides becoming a better teacher and developing qualities such as patience (-when the room is so full that we have to close the doors and the printer isn't working and computers are freezing, its kind of a wildhouse)-, I have learned to become a better artist myself. Photoshop is very useful when it comes to so many different things and the skills that I have learned are so valuable to me.

I've been thinking of what the zeummaster show could look like. For a couple months when I first started at Zeum, the cone show on display was all work of Zeummasters. Everyone got their own cubby and could fill it with whatever they wanted. If there wasn't enough cubbies then they were able to take up a whole wall between two cubbies. I think that that would be really cool because not only would it make Zeummasters feel more apart of Zeum, but hello, we could show off our skills.

I would like to have a show like that and fill a cubby with drawings and photographs of mine.

Another idea that I have for a cone show is a show "Spotlighting on Zeummasters". Everyone would have their own cubby that would kind of be like their biography. They could have anything that they believed represented them inside the cubby. That way, visitors could feel like they know the staff that they interact with. We could take pictures of ourselves in the DW and add effects and filters to it. Then, we could have that picture be in the middle of the cubby, representing us and serving as our profile image.

Overall, DW is my favorite room to be in, other than the Music Production Lab. It is a really great exhibit that everyone should get a chance to experience.
This post was written by Pam, the ultimate Zeummaster.

Behind the Scenes Magic: Video Editing

John here, writing from the Wednesday teen intern crew. As an assignment all the interns have been working on individual projects. My project has been to edit the Zeum Masters' Winter Olympic video.

So far the editing process has been very hard for me. Oh, let me count the reasons why.. FINDING the video of the Winter Olympics wasn't easy. Cutting it down from 45 minutes to 5 wasn't easy. Actually understanding the events in the movie wasn't easy. And having a deadline has been hard too. But fun!

Even though this has been challenging I still just tried to have fun. So I jumped right into the editing process by first watching all the footage. "Not as easy as it sounds"....But I did it and then started editing and cutting left and right. I've been lucky and have had some experience with this but like I said, this hasn't been an easy process!

The first day of editing I was able to cut the video down to about 7 and a half minutes. This was a great success but I ran into one problem I needed a good upbeat song. As I finished the day strong, I decided I need to find the song. So on my commute home I had my Ipod on shuffle and listened while my rough draft of a video played in my head. After 8 songs that didn't work including The Shins and Bloc Party I finally found a song. "YESSSS."!

I can't wait to show the video to the Zeum masters to get their feedback to see what they think. So yeah this has been the Wednesday Intern John signing off.

What does HOME mean to you?

This year Zeum Masters are working tirelessly on an exhibit that will be shown at the end of the year.

Today we started with reflection on our home life. We were given the task to reflect on what "home" means to us, also challenged with making a collage of what we believe this word meant to us.

Without hesitation I went for what I knew to be true about my "home." That is, "Home is where the heart is." Although cliche, it is the truth. I illustrated my own definition with a huge heart in the middle of a green home surrounded by deep strokes of blues. With the words, "Home is where the heart is.." emblazoned in yellow around the house. My home is definitely where my heart is. It is the beat that keeps me going everyday and the center of my world. My situation at home is different then anywhere else outside of it. It is where my heart lies, because that is where my family is.

My situation at home is very different than most. I live with my mom and brother. My mom is a single mom who works three jobs taking up most of her time throughout the week. My brother is pre-med at a local university, he is also very involved at school with clubs and his fraternity. While I go to a high school 20mins away, and usually have something to do after school between student government meetings and club gatherings. With this much going on outside of the house it is hard to get us all in one place. That is why, home is the one place i know to go to when i need to be with family. On the weekend is probably the only time we get to be a family. Although limited, we cherish our time together as a family. Home is stationary to me, always there for me when i need it. Because a house is not a home...home is where the family is and where the heart is.

This project tied into what we will be doing later on with the exhibit. Not only will we be working with different collages but also photoshop. The different layers and mediums we used in our collages ties into the different layers we can develop with adobe photoshop. Next week we will segway into photoshop by making photo composites of a favorite memory of ours.

As we work on this exhibit we are asked to reflect on our personal history and develop our thoughts into our own artforms. Something i cant wait to figure out and develop for myself! =]

Posted by ANGEE

SF MoMA Matches!

This is our first real blog post and boy are we excited. We thought we'd inaugurate this thing with a post about our collaborative activity with one of the other local teen programs.

The San Francisco fog was still thick at 8:30 this morning when SF MoMA came to visit, bringing teens from their "Matches" mentoring program with them.

Before coming, they'd chosen paintings from the current Brice Marden Exhibition, written poems based on those paintings and were prepared to take the transformation one step further by making clay interpretations of those poems and learning animation (from us). Art to poetry to art again. Our much missed educator Bernadette organized this event and the educators and zeum masters ran it with expertise and enthusiasm.

Samantha reflects....

Their task was to visually interpret a poem previously written by the group during another activity. Our job was to help out with the creative process and give them access to the tools we have at zeum. We aided in their brainstorming and fed them ideas to help with their animations. They created visuals to go with their poems and we helped them keep in mind that they'd be animating these creations.

It was interesting to see that until the activity actually started these teens barely spoke to their mentors. As the activity progressed, communication increased between the different age groups. It was nice to see them break out of their shells and realize that although their mentors are older than them, they're still people.

Once they were done with the activity one of our awesome educators Matthew, with a little of my help, led the group in an another activity using stop motion animation - this time with bodies instead of clay. They were also each given clippings from a newspaper. The task: cut words out from the clipping and put them together to create a topic for a short animation that they then created with their own bodies.

It was not only a fun experience for the SFMOMA group and for myself, it was also a chance for us to realize what we can actually do with technology. Coming to Zeum helps people realize just how much can be done with the technology that we all posses in our own homes. It's amazing to think that the same thing these people just did with their bodies, a camera, and a computer is actually done in professional hollywood films. It almost makes me want to go home and make my own movie.

Avia...My role today was explaining how to make a clay animation movie. The teens and adults had to interpret a poem that they wrote and visually make what they saw into a clay movie. I really enjoyed working with the teens from SF MOMA and they made really interesting movies. One that i really loved was a set that looked like a highway and the visitors made cacti out of clay and put it on the highway to make it look 3D. It was really cool! I also thought it was interesting how they wrote a poem and kind of brought it to life.

Bernadette sent us a full report, noting that in fact, we were able to talk to a few of MoMA's teens after the project was said and done and they all said it was their favorite event out of all the stuff they've done in the Matches program.

"Most of our Matches participants had never been to Zeum before and they were excited to have had this opportunity. I just wanted to thank all of the awesome ZeumMasters and Educators that came very early this Saturday morning to help facilitate this wonderful interaction. So, big shout out to Gaby , Sam, Lilian, Avia, Monique and educators Raquel, Ari, Perry, Matthew and Jordan for helping making this a completely awesome experience!! "

And of course, thank you Bernadette.