Working with Teens at Manual Arts High School

I was able to find a group of teens that wished to create animated PSA's based on a subject of interest to them: Safe Jobs for youth. The teens had established their own after school group called Youth in Power, and their mentor, Tony Terry was my connection and support in working with this group. After a rocky start, we settled on 3 teams of 3, each group dealing with a separate issue regarding youth and job safety. The topic chosen by the teams are: Sexual Harrassment, Safety Training, and Undocumented worker rights.

Tony Terry encouraged the kids to keep the content of their PSA's focused on their community, He also mentioned to me that a couple of them really got into Graffiti, so I showed them images from graffiti artists, including Banksy...it really inspired a number of them.

During the concept development stage, the groups had total freedom, I relied on their teachers who were more knowledgeable about the content to approve their concepts. My role during this period was to keep the projects do-able, and concise, and require them all to have an end screen that pointed viewers to more information.

When the groups completed their storyboards, I showed them some examples of "assets" that one might pull together to make an animated piece-- background, props, character sketches, collage characters, etc--and I asked each group to write their list of assets needed. Based on these lists, they were sent out with a digital camera to capture images for backgrounds, characters, and props.

We spent a fair amount of time in Photoshop. With time being a concern, I showed the group 3 ways to approach the look of the piece: Silhouette cutouts, unaltered photo cutouts, or filtered cutouts. One group opted for silhouettes, the other two filtered their photos.

I did a couple of flash lessons, and two out of the three groups had animation in their project. Only one of those groups "finished" however, as the other group had very spotty attendance. The third group that did not have time to animate their PSA opted to go for a comic book look, and work with stills and speech bubbles for now.

At this point, I plan to rejoin the teens in June to get them all to the next level, refine the animation a little, add animation where applicable, and add sound/music.