A World Savvy Tangent

To sort of start off, I'm Dan, and I'm a ZeumMaster. I've gone to Zeum since
I was nine years old, amazed each year with the changes made to each
part of the "museum"...I used to kick the metafield-maze's butt before
they programmed in a level 2. I've been working as a ZeumMaster
for a good seven months now. Done good, made friends and all that.
Everything's been pretty peachy. Capice?

This is also my first time blogging, so don't get too weirded out by whatever
tangents I will quite possibly make.

Yes, it's kinda cheesy, but this is one of the few short video uploads
made by the creative youth at the World Savvy Jam Session whilst informing this generation's long list of intelligent intellects about life changing extremes like poverty, conflict, and peace building in order to prepare a future of great minds.

World Savvy not only encourages a generation of intellectual thinkers, but also challenges people to speak out against unfair situations, promoting natural rights and freedom of individual will, something one could also find at www.youthforhumanrights.org. Look them up.

World Savvy is currently building up for their 2008 theme on Global Health, which, by itself, is one massive topic to cover. But hey, they've done tougher stuff before, and they can do it again, and again, and again, and again.....etc. PBS states in their article on the importance of global health that…

"The world's scientific knowledge, technological expertise, and economic resources are greater than at any point in history. We are capable of applying our collective know-how and wealth to reducing the health risks faced by all nations and alleviating unnecessary human suffering. Many see this as the shared responsibility of wealthier countries. Others continue to raise arguments against pursuing a collaborative approach to the problems of developing nations."

Now, as flawed as the middle sentence is, all countries, be it rich or poor in Resource fulness should be able to touch on a "love thy neighbor" basis. People should be willing to collaborate with each other in order to work towards a common goal, and I think World Savvy brought out global health in order to bridge whatever gaps
they could to help the little guy in this equation.

Poor countries shouldn't have to watch like the lesser sibling while the self appointed favorite sibling gets a bigger slice of the metaphoric cake of good benefits. I know that with every equation, a huge problem has to equal one or more solutions, and that is World Savvy's steps towards a bright future for humankind. I solute your efforts, Savvy.
Keep up the good work.

Those of you who don't know what I'm talking about should go to worldsavvy.org.

ANGEE on Human Rights, Technology and the Artistic Process...

For Parent Night I chose to create a movie based on the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now, the Declaration has THIRTY articles, so I didn't know if I were to make a move based on all THIRTY articles or just a few.

Now, it's still a work in progress. I'm still going to tweek it here and there, but overall it looks good.

Here's what I've done so far:

Enjoy!


Starting out, I realized that basing the movie on all THIRTY articles would be a little ambitious, so i just stuck with the first ten. Then, I had to brainstorm how to do this: animation? drawings? claymation? I didn't know just yet.

LIKE A BOLT OF LIGHTNING it hit me. I could just do images on photoshop based on each article. ADOBE PHOTOSHOP is one of my favorite things to do here at Zeum. I've been working with photoshop for about four years now, so I thought it was a great idea.

On Photoshop made an image for each article. To do this I would get an image from the internet, make it into a black and white/positive and negative image, then define a brush. Photoshop saves the brush automatically. This is a good function to know. The brushes I made then became backgrounds for the images I created.

From there I took the articles and placed the text over the colorful backgrounds. I think it came out great, just like I wanted.

Now, what to do with the images?! Make a gif. file? Movie? Hmm...Then I remembered how well I worked with Windows Movie Maker...PERFECT.

I took the images I made on Photoshop and created a movie. I started with titles introducing the articles and quick history on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, followed by the images I made, and then quick credits at the end. All of this was accompanied with the song, "Dream" by Common and Will.I.Am.

Yeah, it's still a work in progress. But MOST DEFINITELY a project that I'm proud of.

How Do You Define Human Rights?

Through the years my ideas about human rights have changed. I grew up with the perception that human rights violation happened in countries distraught by war and corrupt politicians. The media has presented human rights violation as torturing prisoners and murdering entire villages and I easily accepted the idea that this had no relation to my environment. That changed when I took notice of what was going around me. I have come up with my own definition on human rights: The right to feel safe.

For Example, a ZeumMaster left her purse near the programing station in Main Gallery and later found it at the bottom of the stairs with all her belongings stolen. She lost her phone, her iPod, but more importantly she lost her sense of safety. Having your belongings stolen - Could that be categorized as a human rights violation? When we're in an environment where we feel completely comfortable, having something as unfortunate as this happen makes the experience that much worse. You have the right to feel that not only you are safe, but your processions are as well. Although some may not agree I would categorize this event as a human rights violation.

It could have happened anywhere. And I love Zeum. But I just want to say that even your safe places can be violated.

I'm doing a documentary project where I'm interviewing Zeum staff members and strangers and using their experiences and their definitions of human rights to create a video. I'm going to record them as they answer the following questions: How would you define human rights? What do you need to feel safe? Have you ever felt unsafe?

I hope to show that feeling safe is a simple right that everyone deserves. Human rights violation does not have to be as intense a physical torture, for it to make someone feel uncomfortable. Everyone has stories and I want to share them.

Creating a documentary will not only give me the opportunity to use a video camera and edit, but using real stories with real people will create a strong message.

End of the Reel: last day at zeum

This is my final blog post. My internship is coming to an end and my last day is May 16 so I decided to write a blog comparing my first day to my day yesterday and see how I have changed from this internship.

My first day at Zeum I had no idea of what I was getting into I knew no one but my mentor. I didn’t know if I would get along with any of my co-workers and I didn’t think I could handle the 7 hour days. It is very strange how things can change it 12 weeks.

My first day on the job I was very reserved and just talked to the people I knew, which by the way were my classmates and fellow interns. After my first day I had no clue if I was even going to enjoy my time here.

As I look back to yesterday and compare it to my first day I can give a big smile. I am going to miss all my co-workers, the happy kids and their families, and my mentor. Over the 12 weeks of work I have been able to develop a professional and personal relationship with everyone there. Hanging out in the office, the main floor, eating lunch with the other interns, can’t forget watching the Matthew and Perry singing and dancing. I would really like to thank all the staff for making my internship exciting and always making ready to come in.

Finally I want to talk about my project. My project to me was simple but ended up being very hard. I felt that editing a movie of teens playing games was going to be a piece of cake. First of all I just like to edit - it is a passion for me. Here, the part that got hard was that I didn’t understand any of the footage. I also didn’t understand how important it was to the teen interns and to Zeum in general.

After having 2 meetings with my mentor and director of the intern program I knew it had to be good. Still I wasn’t moved to try my hardest. In fact it was after meeting the other teen interns and seeing their reaction I put all my effort to making it good for them. This project taught me that it is important to think of others because one small thing to me can mean a whole lot to the others.

I want to thanks the ZeumMasters who made working there a good time for me.

Documentary in the Making

Hey this is Michael M.

This year I am senior in a very small high school in Oakland. Each senior is making a year long project related to their internship. Mine is Zeum and I also go to a video program after school. I get a lot of support in video making in my after school program called the factory and at Zeum. So my project is a documentary on myself and how I grew from a shy person in school to a person that loves to express himself in front the entire school.

This documentary isn't any ordinary documentary with interviews and narrative It will be told in a very dense poem I made that expands the entire four years (of high school). This means that what you see on the screen is words telling my story = a poem. There will be images in the background too. This is what makes it a documentary. It will include personal stories that I experience that I never told anyone else but myself. So it will be a personal Peace about my life so that people can relate to. Right now I just finish the first rough draft and I am so excited about it because its building up right in front of me.

Through Struggles,
Challenges,
I made me. - a line from my documentary.

Zeum staff are really helping me a lot with organizing my timeline for my project. I feel I get a lot of my creative ideas here. When I work in the music video production lab I pay close attention to the educator who is instructing the kids. I pay attention to the type of background the kids would choose and the costumes they wear. I aways wonder if those fit together if they would look right in front of a camera. I will be thinking about that in my mind. It's like a puzzle - what works, what doesn't. Even though my video is all words, this is still inspirational because I can look at the colors and think about how to use color in mine.

For example, one day a group of boys were making a music video - two of them were wearing a bird mask and one was just rapping. They had some kind of lava background and I saw that it worked well with their costumes since their mask were red and orange. It gave me ideas about what I should add in my documentary.

I hope that my movie will turn out great. To be continued...

Poetic Heroes

Hero.

"A woman/man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for their brave deeds and noble qualities. The principal female/male character in a story, play, film, etc."

Well, that's how Webster's dictionary defines hero. But for me a hero is more than someone I admire it's people who help me make up what I am today. There are many heroes in my family that I love and respect but to go deeper, my more personal are people who I admire in the industry that I hope to go into, media.

For my end of the year project at Zeum I am working on Media and my self image - how people in the media have affected who I am and inspired me to go further with whatever I chose to do. Like Gaby's but different. The people who I feel closely connected to are Oprah Winfrey, Queen Latifah, and Will Smith, not only are they successful in the roles they play on screen and on stage but being African American they have became respected in anything they choose to do.

There are so many people that I could look up to, why are these people what's so special? Will Smith and Queen Latifah are both singers in the hip hop business and Oscar nominees. They all are able to do a wide variety of performances like from comedy to drama, to musicals. They're all entrepreneurs. Oprah is a great inspiration because she also came from a background of severe poverty. These are people who do work for their communities.

To deliver my ideas for this project, I'm going to do a spoken word performance. Now, at first I wasn't so sure about spoken word, it is a type of performance, but not like any I ever done before.

I tend to lean more toward to stage performance where I'm given a script and and I act out a character. Through this project though, I can perform alone, myself - which it's hard to say, but it might be the hardest role I have yet to experience. Kwesi and Ari explained the concept of spoken word and other things I can do with different types of media. I get to learn more about this type of performance and work on being able to get my ideas onto paper and on stage.

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.