Making a documentary

In the afternoons at the Huckleberry Hill Project we are making a documentary.  It is a bold idea that exceeds our current capabilities and is as daunting as it is exciting.  Exciting because there are so many areas of learning to explore and so many possibilities of things we could do. Daunting because I have to make a leap of faith that we as a group can handle this monumental task ahead of us and scurry up the learning curve to gain the necessary skills we will need to accomplish our goals.

I, in all of my optimism and naivete, have jumped in whole hog into understanding Final Cut Pro X and filming using DSLR cameras. I have been reading books, watching endless YouTube tutorials, analyzing documentaries I like and talking to my film making friends. I have video and audio equipment and soft light boxes and a bunch of excited children eager to learn these skills.

Learning these skills is the reason I decided to make a documentary in the first place.  Making a documentary involves so many skills that the children will have to integrate. We as a group are role modeling how people can go out into the community, express themselves, stand up and have an opinion and importantly work together as a team on a project bigger than any one individual.  But this is a long process and there are a huge amount of steps and learning experiences we will be having on that journey. As always, it is the journey that I am most excited about.

We have brainstormed hundreds of ideas together as a group and discussed how to recognize an inspirational vision for the project and how to record it so it can be shared with the group.  One of the children had a vision during the week, a grand vision that she shared at our last meeting and we are picking it up and running with it.

We have organized to see a documentary maker/cameraman to teach us how to use our camera and how to visualize scenes.  I have been reading/watching web tutorials/researching everything I can about the technical side of shooting a documentary.  I have been out setting custom white balances, testing lenses and indoor lighting scenarios and I am feeling pretty good about our set up.

We have mapped out the beginning of a story line for the documentary, color coded grid paper with different clip types, counted out how long clips are and discussed different types of clips.  Next week I hope to lay out our rationale and plan out our first segment.

Our plan will be laid out on a 4ft roll of brown paper that we will be taking to the farmhouse.  Every part of the plan is going to be moveable so the children can see it and manipulate it. I am trying to do this in a way that children will be able to replicate the process when/if they make their own documentaries at some point.  Most importantly, those skills will be transferable to the management of the various projects they will encounter in their lives.  We have to make sure everyone knows what is going on and we have a large range of ages and learning types in the group.  Everyone has a role to play and we now have filled up the various roles (editing, filming, sound etc...) with eager children. 

It is daunting and exciting to undertake a challenging project from ground zero.  Yet we ask our kids to do this all the time and this is teaching them to go about it in a methodical way.  We also have so much information at our fingertips and many resources we will tap. It is a fantastic time to try something new and utilize the gifts that thousands are sharing on the internet. You don't need to sign up for a class as the information you need right now is just a click away.  All you need to do is allow the visions to bubble up, encourage the excitement, harness the creativity and impart the power of a methodical process.

I am grateful for the many contributions that everyone is making.  I don't know what the final result will be like but I know that the skills gathered along the way will last a long time.  Anyway, as you can tell I continue to be really excited about this project and the people involved in it.

Horrible Histories

A couple of months ago I bought a box of horrible histories. Imagine a box of 20 kid friendly books filled with the history of the world, fun facts and comics in an easy to read format (not exactly classic literature or living books).

I thought Tristan would devour these.  He loves history and lately we have been in a bit of a history slump.  He took the plastic of the box and picked them over and then stated,  "I am not reading these until they have detoxed."

He put one on top of the air purifier.

I was a bit disappointed. I thought this box was going to launch him into a reading frenzy and lead him towards some great history project.

So I forgot about them.

And today he picked one up and started reading one and is almost finished with the next one sitting next to him waiting to be read. YES!!!!!

Post it Notes

One of the things I love about the Huckleberry Hill Project is that we are modeling skills that the children can use to help them along in their own personal projects.  On Tuesday afternoons we are making a documentary as a group and no matter what the outcome, the group project is a fantastic way to introduce and role model skills the children will need to make their own ideas come alive.

Today the children worked on their projects for almost two hours before we met to watch a presentation by Cormac who is starting the Green Project.  You can see one of his recent blog posts here.  Cormac used Pages, an editing/publishing software available as an app for the Mac.  This is a great program for the children to become familiar with.  We decided that it is beneficial for them to use similar software so they can teach each other how to use it and recognize files. All of our members have Macbooks or iPads.  We are going to get a dongle so that the children can project presentations onto the wall using iPads to make presenting easier.

In the afternoon we started brainstorming ideas for the documentary.  What do we want to do it on? What is our story?  We used technique we use doing Destination ImagiNation called "Stop and Go".  We wrote ideas on post it notes and put them up on the wall.  We read them out and then went to round two of idea creation and put up more and more ideas.  Soon we had a wall of ideas.  Then we started organizing them.  Themes popped out of the wall and a picture started developing about what the group wants to do.

That was fun. Time whizzed by. We could have gone on and on.  In the second half of the meeting we talked about storage. We talked about how and where we need to store the video that we take for our documentary.  We all have footage already and we need to have a system so we don't lose our precious files.  Steph, one of our parents and IT specialist explained that we all needed Dropbox accounts so we  can keep our data on a server.  We all downloaded Dropbox onto our devices.  We made a 2HP storage bin in Dropbox to use as a collection point.

The other part of todays meeting was the importance of proper "nomenclature" to name files so we can easily retrieve media that we will need for the documentary.  We need to be masters in digital organization to make our workflow more efficient.  Steph consults with companies on how to manage their technology effectively and we need everyone to adopt the same protocol for file management to make our experience with technology less frustrating. I am incredibly grateful to have her expertise on hand during our meetings.

We will be working on this again next week.  It takes a while to get the hang of all of this technology, but at the same time it is empowering.

The best part of learning these skills is watching the children independently use them on their own for their own projects.  After the meeting I went upstairs for a relax and a cup of coffee.  Little did I know that Claire was working out how to bring dogs to Connecticut from a high kill shelter in Georgia using skills we practiced today.

It is all very exciting.

Meet Star and Haley

Now that Jessie has a forever home, we have two new rescues.  Star is a young 7 month old Pitbull mix that we rescued from Bridgeport Animal Control.  She had been in the shelter for 8 weeks and was very shy and scared of people.  They told us she was shut down, however when Claire sat on the floor next to her she started opening up.  We took her out and before long she was wagging her tail and licking Claire all over.

She is the cutest little dog.  She falls asleep in your arms when you pet her.  We couldn't leave her there.  Three days later she has socialized very well in our family.  She is getting on very well with Tuggles and she is very warm and snuggly.  We all love her.

Haley (rescue #5) came from Tennessee.  She was picked out of a line of dogs slated for euthanasia, transported to Connecticut but had nowhere to go.  Lucky Tails accepted her into its foster network after she was surrendered to us by another rescue organization that Claire has connections with.   Haley has some issues.  There has been some trauma in her past. She is a one year old cattle/shepherd dog mix and she is shy especially with men.  She is calm and likes to stay outside away from people.  Claire has her already eating out of her hand and coming up to her but she has a little way to go before she is well socialized.  She would make a great dog for an older person who would like some company.  She is not jumpy and would make a quiet loving companion.

Wilderness School

When I first started homeschooling 5 years ago I signed both of my children up for Two Coyotes, a wilderness school where the children spend one day a week in nature.  It is a day filled with games, stories and discovery in the bush.  I believe spending time in nature, away from screens and connected to the land is very important to a child's development. It is where children learn to respect, understand and love the earth and its treasures.  Their teachers know every tree and creature and take their time to explain the secrets of the woods.

After a few seasons I decided to have a break from it.  Claire had a tick bite and Lyme symptoms and after that I was a little wary of sending my kids into the woods.  My eyesight is not as it used to be and ticks are tiny.

Recently Two Coyotes started a program at Woodcock Nature Center, our local nature center where Tristan has enjoyed going to summer camps.  He couldn't wait for this program to start.  He wears his belt with a pocketknife his Grandfather gave him.  He throws on his backpack and his man vs wild attitude and heads out the door.  It is a good thing, although I am still a little scared of the ticks.

First Day of the Huckleberry Hill Project

The Huckleberry Hill Project is a new project-based model of homeschooling education I am exploring. Eight families including seventeen children meet one Tuesday a week to work on projects they are passionate about.  It started on the staircase at Escape to the Arts in Danbury, when a few of the mothers at our homeschooling coop talked about how amazing all of this technology is and how it would be great for kids to work on projects that they were truly passionate about and through that acquire all of the technological skills to express themselves in any way they choose to.  It turned out that many of our children already had ideas, great ideas just waiting to be brought to life.

Then I thought we needed to role model how to make a greater change in our community and reach more people.  I came up with a group project.  As individuals we are one but as a group all pulling for one big idea who knows how far we could go.

I started thinking about things we could do that would empower us to go out and reach for our own personal visions and give us the necessary skills to do that.  I came up with making a documentary, as it is a way to show how ordinary people can come together to fix the problems we see in our communities and make a difference.  Video is a way that people will be communicating in the future.  A picture tells a thousand words, a video...millions and across cultures too.

It is hard for a group of kids to come together and materialize a big idea.  We as educators need to role model how we can do it, and use our collective skills to make something happen, so that they will be empowered to make their own dreams come true.

So, yesterday this project started.

It went well although not without glitches.  I believe in our process 100%.  This is a new concept.  Change is difficult.  There are teething issues.  But I am seeing great things wherever I look. The skills and empowerment the children are gaining from this type of experience are tangible and transferable into every facet of their lives.

The children worked hard on their projects.  Two of the children presented impressive powerpoint presentations to the group about their motivation for their project and the project they have made so far.

It rained over lunch. We talked about how difficult it is to fit all of the children's activities into the day. How hard it is to prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner before a long commute to an activity and to be out all day.  I thought how different our lives are compared to how homeschoolers are generally perceived.
I thought about how we could make our lives simpler.

In the afternoon we had a documentary making workshop.  How do 25 people make a documentary?  1t is not an easy thing to be "in charge" of this event.  I take my role seriously.  I am prepared and nervous at the same time.  I am sailing in unknown waters, leading people in the dark. Yet I am confident in my process.  I want children to be able to do this alone after I am done.  I want them to understand what it takes to make something like this happen.  I want them to learn the skills involved and be empowered.  I want them to reach for the sky and get somewhere close.

Luckily I am not alone.  I have enthusiastic supporters, people providing skills and tech help, motivators and facilitators, kind friends, listeners, caring mothers and people I can lean on.

I decided to use fish as a metaphor for our wonderful individual contributors to the documentary.  We are going to try and work together, swim as a group yet branch out into areas of interest.  We are going to pull together when there is a deadline. (This is a strange concept for a homeschooler!)

We all made a fish and placed the fish under the heading where we are most interested in working.  Stars are second choices.  We have some very excited documentary makers!

We talked about documentaries we have seen, their messages and that documentaries are a way to research a topic, to explore something we care about.  What do we care about? Our documentary is going to be about how we are going to ensure a safe food supply in our future.  Our IT specialist modeled using mindmapping software as a way to record a meeting and a groups thoughts.  Later I went through different roles and thought about how children could use this mindmapping app (Simplemindsfree) to work out how to move forward in their group.

Later in our day, one of our participants, who had earlier presented to the group how he is setting up a youth film festival, gave a 30 minute seminar on how to make an iMovie.  IMovie is very similar to Final Cut Pro X.  My Final Cut Pro Instructor suggested the children make movies first on iMovie before embarking on Final Cut Pro X.   We saw a cool iMovie that Kaya, one of our participants, had made about the difference between a free range egg from chicken with a varied diet including bugs and an egg that is the product of a hen in the industrial food system. By the end of the day making an iMovie seemed quite doable, and as we had filmed the children working on their projects, we even had footage to get started with.

I was so happy to become acquainted with these new skills, especially mind mapping.  I feel we moved forward in our process.  It is wonderful for the children that time is set aside every week for them to concentrate on creating something that they dared to dream.  It is exciting to see the children engaged  and busy, working on their own unique projects.  I am proud of them.

Newsy Post

There is so much happening right now that I can't keep up with posts so this is a newsy post to get up to date.

Lucky Tails

Claire has been busy up until late most nights working on her company.  She has designed t-shirts, set up a filing cabinet, made labels for products, picked up many items from Freecycle for  her dogs (crates, collars and leashes etc), found out the addresses of everyone within a mile radius from our house so she can direct mail them a plea to be a foster family! and researching how to liaise with volunteers in the South to bring the occasional dog up to Connecticut.  She is also preparing for the Stratford dog show and has a tent (borrowed from a lady at the Fire Department) and has had a banner and new business cards made.  She is making a large display board to go on her table.

She was also contacted by a cable channel who asked to do a segment on her on the news so she can get more exposure.  They will be coming to film her at the dog fair.  She has also been asked if she'd like to set up a booth at various rescue events that are coming up over the next month.  We are limiting her to one event/weekend to try and keep sane.  She held her second adoption event at Choice's pet supply last Saturday and a family is interested in adopting Jessie (Claire's most recent rescue).

Jessie had two lumps removed at the vet 10 days ago.  One was fine but the other was a mast cell tumor- low grade but a stage 2 which was completely removed.  She has a great prognosis, but of course being cancerous, it is a little scary.  Her potential family seems not to mind but we want to make sure they do their research as we don't want Jessie to end up back in a shelter somewhere.  We want to find a perfect family and she is such a great dog.  We love her and will keep her until the right family comes along.

On Thursday we are going on a rescue mission to the Hartford, Bridgeport and Fairfield shelters.  I will keep you updated.

Tristan's Dance 

Tristan had a dance recital last week.  He was with a little breakdancing crew of beginners that did a summer dance program at the Enchanted Garden.  Tristan is loving his dance.  Nicole, his teacher is coming once a week and on Tuesdays Tristan goes to the studio to dance with his homeschooling friends, Kaya and Evren and other dance buddies.  After class they have a special hip hop session with Nicole, just the 3 of them.  They are so cute and funky to watch.

Wicked

Claire has been enjoying her singing classes at The Studio.  Her teacher knows all of the cast of Spiderman, her favorite musical and is very charismatic.  Claire LOVES...I should say lives for her singing class.  She has been singing Use Somebody and now she is moving on to a Taylor swift song.  She has also been going to her group singing class where they are learning all the songs from Wicked.  So far they have done Defying Gravity and Popular.  Her teachers will choose someone to sing each song solo in a concert on December 13th.  She likes this class a lot but it challenges her in many ways. Here is a photo of her doing popular in her group.  She is in a green t-shirt.

Penny Lane Players

Our esteemed directors

Last night the parts for this years's Shakespeare play came out.  Claire is playing Peter Quince and Tristan will be Francis Flute.  These characters are part of group of actors that have been sequested to perform a play at King Theseus's wedding day.  You probably know the story...  Claire is the director of this little play and Tristan plays a boy who is forced to play "a girl in love" in the performance much to his disappointment.  It is an hilarious part and I think he will have fun doing it.

Claire wanted to play a girl this year (as she is usually cast as a boy)...so she is allowed to change the role to Petrina Quince if she so desires.  Because both my children are in the same scenes our rehearsal schedule won't be as crazy as last year and I am very happy about that.  It will be a great year with so many children in the production, most of whom have acted together before.

After two hours of reading the play, these guys were ready for a play/nap.

Final Cut Pro at Jacob Burns
I decided to go and take a class in Final Cut Pro as I was thinking of using it to edit our documentary.  I met Iva our instructor and found out that we were going to be learning FCP7, a different version than what I was expecting and very different to what I need to know to edit our documentary.  Final Cut Pro X is very similar to iMovie and also a better choice if you are using 1080i footage from a SLR camera.  It is also more intuitive for children especially if they have already learned iMovie.

FCP7 is fun to use and I am enjoying learning it even though I can't use it.  At least I will understand what is involved in preparing clips for a documentary.  In January classes for FCPX will most likely be available at Jacob Burns, so I will take them if I can.

It is fun and unusual to actually take a class for myself and I like that feeling!

The Huckleberry Hill Project (2HP)
2HP starts tomorrow!    I am so excited about it and can't wait to start.  Many of the kids have already started their projects and I am thrilled to get the structure in place that will continually motivate them and give them the necessary skills to do and share great things with the rest of the world.  I have seen great development in Claire over the last 3 months as she has motored through the initial stages of her project and I now marvel at the ease she has, talking to people about her project.  There is great energy in the house and we are excited to start our days.

This week has been especially fun as documentary equipment has started arriving and I am in the process of making a hub for the documentary making.  It is actually happening and soon this project will have a life of its own.

Our two youngest members are setting up an indoor garden (4ft x 8ft) under lights in the basement.  Soren just wants to grow a garden for his project and Nick is undecided on his great work so the two of them will be making a garden, expressing themselves through art. They are also going to learn how to use technology to show the world what they are doing!

Wholefood Kitchen Online Class
I have been very busy.  When I am extremely busy (as I keep myself normally) my diet is the first to go.
I have read a lot about healthy food and know how to prepare it but it is hard to fit in supermarket visits and to prepare in advance all the different components to create three healthy meals a day for my children and I.  I feel that I can do it if I just focus on that. But it is not interesting to me.  I have so many other things to do, teaching the kids, driving here and there, cleaning up after the zillions of projects we have going on.   I can make up excuses but really I just need to get organized and motivated.

To achieve these goals I thought I would do Heather Brueggerman's Wholefood Kitchen course over the next two months.  It started today!  I thought on Monday night's I would have a sauna, read through all the material and plan a to do list for the week.  I don't know how successful I will be but I feel I have to do something otherwise I am going to eat toast and drink wine for the next three months.  Anyway I am glad I will get my weekly downloads and reminders that will bring my attention back to this very important aspect of my life that tends to  fall to the side.

Birthday
And I turned 44! I had a cake and I had a bunch of people sing me happy birthday which was awesome!!!  I felt very special and happy...so thank you for that!


YAY!  I've caught up!  And tomorrow I can post about the first day of 2HP!