Brett Gaylor - Web Made Movies at BAVC

February 26, 2011

Two things I learned this week:

1) Exercise caution when giving 12 high school students access to an etherpad that is projected against a wall

2) The Bay Area Coalition (BAVC)’s Factory program for youth is srs bizness

Mozilla has partnered up with the Bay Area Video Coalition and Zero Divide to implement the technologies coming out of Web Made Movies into the current curriculum of The Factory, a video collective for motivated youth in the Bay.

Ben Moskowitz and I came to meet members of the collective, and were joined by our Mozilla colleagues Atul Varna and Lukas Blakk. Lukas had recently been working with teenage girls at the Dare 2 B Digital Conference, addressing the gender gap in computer science, and Atul has been working on the Hackasaurus project with Drumbeat, a set of tools to encourage kids to hack the web. The 2 days at BAVC were for us a way to test some of our thinking about “web literacy”, to test the Butter authoring tool, and to meet the youth at BAVC. We were hoping that they’d understand what we were banging on about after the two days and would be inspired to bring a hacker ethic to their projects.

Our first excercise was to wake the HACKASAURUS. Everyone checked out the X-Ray Goggles, a fantastic tool that lets you see how a web page is put together, and modify elements of it. Paired with HTMLpad.org, which renders HTML typed into an Etherpad of the same name (try it - its awesome), the Hackasaurus tools teach the user that the web really is made up of many simple parts. To help visualize things, students printed out their favourite websites, cut them up, pasted them back together, and re-created their cutups in HTML. Its a great basis on which to start playing with popcorn.js - it puts one in the mindspace to consider “how can I hack this video?”.

Fortunately, our friends at Bocoup had pushed some last minute changes to Butter, the authoring tool for popcorn, and it was ready enough to be tested by the group. We loaded up one of their productions from last year, “The List”, which was a dramatization of the military recruitment that happens when students take standardized tests. There was a lot of factual information in the video, so it was a perfect test bed for popcorn.

The students formed groups and each took a section of The List and pulled it into Butter. They added semantic data, some hacked with Ben a method for displaying images on top of the frame, others linked to an HTML page that let users opt-out of recruitment, others brought in photos from flickr, articles from Wikipedia and maps of their school on Google Maps. Lukas wrote a quick script that would chain the videos together, and then we had a screening at the last minute!

You can watch the completed movies here - keep in mind these were created in two hours by a group that had never written any HTML, so we were well impressed.

One of the great things that came out of the workshop was a huge list of bugs for popcorn and butter created by the students that we can now bring back to the development community. We’re looking forward to coming back in April and working with The Factory through till the fall!