 Hello everybody, and welcome to Baby Steps Producing a Compelling Story with Kim Tong and Tristan Hansen. And my name is Kyla Hunt. I'll be your facilitator today. A little bit about ReadyTalk, which is the webinar platform we'll be using today. You'll see the chat pane in the left-hand side of your screen. If you have any questions right now or throughout the webinar, you can go ahead and type those questions into the chat pane. If they're about the content, most likely I'll be reading those out loud to the presenters near the end of the presentation, and those questions will be answered verbally. And if you lose your Internet connection at any time, you can reconnect using the link that was emailed to you, so just the way that you entered in just now, you can do it again at any point during the presentation. And then for some reason you really do completely lose the presentation. And we will be recording today's webinar. And the webinar will be available on the TechSoup website, and it will also be emailed to all registrants for today's webinar. So you'll be receiving both this presentation, the slide deck, and any applicable links. And then if you want to go ahead and tweet to us at TechSoup using the hashtag Baby Steps Comp for Baby Step Competition, you can do that anytime throughout the webinar. So again, a little bit about the presenters today. My name is Kyla Hunt, and I'll be facilitating for TechSoup. Kim Tong is with us from the California Academy of Sciences. She's an early childhood coordinator at the California Academy of Sciences. She manages the Early Explorers Cove, a hands-on activity room, designed for children ages 0 to 5 and their caregivers, as well as the staff who run through the space. And then prior to joining the California Academy of Sciences, she also worked as a preschool teacher. And then also joining us today will be Tristan Hansen, who is a staff video producer at C3 Communications. She uses her passion for public policy and great storytelling to bring nonprofit stories to life for C3's clients. And she's recently produced videos for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, the Union of Concerned Scientists, National Immigrant Justice Center, and the American Association of Endodontists. Alongside her work at C3, she is the associate producer for the feature documentary Almost Is There. And then also the name that you'll be seeing in the chat pane talking to you a lot will be Ali Bezekian, and she'll be helping us on the back end from TechSoup. And so a little bit about what we'll be covering today. I'm going to go ahead and introduce both TechSoup and Baby Steps video competition. And then I'll be handing it over to Kim who will be talking a little bit about a way to help children engage early childhood education models. And then we'll be hearing from Tristan Hansen who will be giving us some production tips. And then of course at the end we will be handling some of your questions. And again, if you have any questions at any time go ahead and text those into the chat pane. So a little bit about TechSoup. TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit with a clear focus. They really want to connect nonprofits, charities, public libraries, and foundations with those tech resources, products, and services that they need to fulfill their mission. They've been around a long time since the 1980s and have distributed more than 11 million software and hardware donations to eligible recipients. They've reached more than 400,000 nonprofit, library, and philanthropy subscribers in the United States with their newsletters each year. And we have a few new things happening at TechSoup that we wanted to make sure that you knew about. TechSoup is now doing some consulting services and they also have some new product donations including Windows 8.1 and QuickBooks 2014 to look out for. So that's some exciting news for 2014 this year. And you can find out more about all of this at our great website, TechSoup.org. So just a little bit about the Baby Steps competition which I'm sure a lot of you have heard about in joining this webinar. That's part of a webinar series surrounding that competition. The Baby Steps competition is a collaborative from the group called Invest Early. This group includes the Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Dirty Robbers Production Company, and TechSoup, among others. This group is involved with helping ensure that those who interact with young children to 0-5 have the resources they need to provide them with a quality early childhood education. And so the Baby Steps competition is a video competition ending in early February that asks you what I do with my kids, what do you do with yours? And this question is being asked both to parents and to early childhood educators including librarians. Basically, a lot of people who help young children engage and learn. And the videos are meant to be short video clips showing what these educators and parents do with children to help them learn to engage both at home and in that educational setting. And so to kind of look at the Baby Steps competition really quickly, I want to go ahead and play a video for you. So let me go ahead and start. This is what I do with my child, what do you do with yours? The Baby Steps competition asks you to submit videos that capture a snapshot of how we care for children during the first five years of their lives. For parents and families, we're looking for short videos taken by iPhone or by camera, whatever you have that's able to capture the simple everyday things you do with your child or family member. For care providers and teachers, we want to help you generate videos by capturing all the creative things you do to inspire your students. Whether it's reading, singing, playing or coloring, the Baby Steps competition will be running from December 2nd to February 2nd and will be recognizing winners based on four criteria. Their emotional value, their educational value, the creativity of the activity and the quality of the video. Go to babystepscompetition.com to learn more about how to enter and see why we believe the first five years of a child's life are vital to investing. Okay, and so that's a little bit about the Baby Steps video competition and we will be sending out a little bit more information about that competition in our follow-up email. Of course, this webinar is the third in a series of four webinars that we are providing as a service to the Baby Steps competition. We'll be sending out the previous two in the series in that follow-up email as well as the information on how to register for next week. If you are not in an organization that works with children and you're concerned whether or not this webinar will be applicable to you, it really will be for the most part. We really are trying to make all of these webinars applicable to anybody who wants to create a video to help tell their organization's story or anything like that. We will be starting off today with Kim's presentation about how she helps children engage at her organization, but then we will be listening to Tristan talk about video production and that will be really applicable to everybody. So I wanted to make sure that everybody understood that. And if you are interested in participating in the Baby Steps competition, just know that the contest submissions close on February 2nd. So again, we will be sending out information about that after today's webinar. So with that, I wanted to go ahead and hand it over to Kim Tong who will be talking about creating meaningful one-on-one time. So take it away Kim. Thank you so much for that. So again, I'm Kim Tong. And in this presentation I'll be talking about the importance of one-on-one learning experiences and kind of how to locate those opportunities for engaging children with this type of learning experience. So I'm not sure that everyone listening is worried about the California Academy of Sciences. So first, I'll give a little background of the space and to kind of help contextualize the rest of the presentation. So the California Academy of Sciences is located in San Francisco, California and it's a nonprofit scientific institution that aims to explore, explain and sustain the natural world. We are a Natural History Museum, Planetarium and Aquarium, all kind of rolled into one. And we try to use all the resources available to us to engage with all ages in learning. And as you know, learning doesn't happen solely in a classroom. It can happen anywhere, regardless of how old you are. Whether at home or in a park, by the beach, at a museum or activity room, there are plenty of opportunities to engage a child in a learning experience. For example, you can ask a child how things feel or what they smell and see and that can help them, their language develop. You can connect their old experiences with new ones to create meaningful learning situations. One of my favorite ways of doing this is through storytelling. And stories are important for a multitude of reasons. They encourage simple language and sentence structures. They help children learn about and how to handle different situations. It helps them identify problem-solving strategies. And best of all, it's one of the easiest ways to capture a child's attention. And stories don't have to just be straight from a storybook. You can use puppets and pictures and figurines. And more recently, technology, if used appropriately, can provide an additional source of information for compelling storytelling. For example, the video we just saw earlier, if you were to set a child and discuss what was going on with the other children we're doing, that's a way of telling a story. You can turn off the audio and just ask them what they are seeing and things like that. So I'm going to go ahead and just talk about an example of the public space that people can use for this type of thing. And if you need the Baby Steps video competition, and that's the Early Explorers course. As mentioned before, it's an activity space in the California Academy of Sciences that's geared for children 0-5 and their caregivers. It's filled with open-ended activities and information that can be available next to the activities to kind of help guide the storytelling. Information like facts about an animal, its habitat, and even ideas on how to use materials for learning experiences based on a child's developmental level. Staff are also there to help guide adults in engaging with their children and to model appropriate behavior. They ask open-ended questions and use descriptive words to encourage children to ask questions and engage children in learning how to find those answers. And there are many places where one can find opportunities for meaningful on-one experiences with a young child. Sometimes it just takes a bit of searching and asking questions. And eventually you'll find multiple safe spaces where you can slowly challenge a child for their development and be able to record it in some way to reflect back on, which gives them another way of learning. That's the end of my presentation. Great. Thank you, Kim. I really appreciate it. And if anybody wants to learn more about the Early Explorers Cove, I have put the information, the URL, so you can find out a little bit more about that. So if you're living in the California area, I'm sure you'll want to find out a little bit more about that. And I did have a couple of questions about the competition a little bit more, so I just wanted to go ahead and reiterate what it was said in chat just now. Somebody was asking a little bit more about who's putting on the competition. Again, the basic competition is being put on by a number of partners, but it came from an idea from Invest Early and further by Design had around raising visibility for early childhood education. And just to reiterate as well, that banner film that I showed earlier was created by Dirty Robber Production Team. So just so you guys have that information. So with that, I'm going to leave it obviously. If anybody has any questions for Kim, please go ahead and type those into the chat pane at any time, even through Tristan's section. And I will get that back to Kim at the end of the presentation. But at that, I'm going to go ahead and make sure that we have enough time for Tristan's section. I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to her at this point. So again, thank you, Kim, so much for your awesome presentation. And take it away, Tristan. Thank you, Kim, and Allie and Kyla for all your good work in putting this on. I love the video. The bubbles made me think – I'm calling in from Chicago where the bubbles made me think about people doing experiments with bubbles right now in the minus 30 weather outside and seeing if they'll actually freeze while floating. So it is cold here. I am a video producer at C3 Communications. C3 is a firm that works exclusively with nonprofits on strategic consulting, website design, and video production. Today I am going to focus entirely on some tips and tricks for production for the non-professional. And I understand the folks listening to the webinar are parents and educators, librarians, and folks who work with the 0-5 age group, which is such a critical age group. When we talk about making videos around the topics that Baby Steps competition is addressing, a lot of times we are thinking about a basic video that features an interview with some footage of people in action. So today we're going to talk first about the interviewing process and look at a few tips around that. Then I'm going to discuss a few shooting tips in general. And then I'm going to present seven essential shots that you'll want to get whenever you go out to shoot any kind of scene. Today we're not going to be talking about cameras and what you should buy or what you should use and all of that tech information as it's very vast and everyone's got a different gear. However, I will note that most of what I'm talking about today could be shot on a cell phone or with a prosumer camera or a consumer level camera. Let's get started with interviewing, which is our first topic. I want to start right off the bat with emphasizing that one essential thing to conducting a good interview is obviously to writing your questions down first and asking very simple open-ended questions. Oftentimes an interview goes wrong right away because the interviewer starts off with a question but then they modify it as they ask it. So tell me about what happened in 1981, which is an okay question but then when you met so-and-so and did this and then there was this other thing. So just be sure that your questions are simple and that there's only one question in each question and of course avoid yes and no questions. If I ask you did you enjoy that experience and the subject says yes, there's really nowhere to go there. Always print two copies of the questions before your interview. I like to keep one in my hand and one in my purse so that when I set the one in my hand down in the bathroom or on the side of the room and I can't find it later, I know there's another copy backing me up. Setting up for the interview, it is critical that you choose a good location. The larger the room, the better, ideally with some color or some things in the room that tell you a little bit about the person. For example, if I'm interviewing a parent, interviewing them in their office space isn't indicative of their role in my particular video which is as a parent. You also want a quiet and controlled environment. We're going to talk later about, excuse me, we're going to talk later about sound and given the limitations on a lot of folks' microphones, one thing you can do to help your sound is to control it by eliminating exterior sound. There's a few other tips here but in the interest of time I'm going to go ahead and move on and everyone can kind of read the details. These last steps are really about setting up in advance. When you do an interview you should arrive an hour to beforehand check everything out, record a test run, make sure everything works before your subject arrives. This will give you a great peace of mind. Another thing that's really important is that you have two chairs with you that are the same height and the same kind of chair more or less. Often you can run into a situation where there's one stool and one wheelie chair in a room. Avoid wheels at all costs. Your subject will start moving around on those wheels about five minutes into your interview. So two chairs, same height. I like to choose a very, very simple folding chair so I don't see the back of the chair. Unless you're trying to say something about the person's environment by using a particular chair. Also powder. Translucent powder is your best friend for interviews. Your job as a producer, professional or not, is to make your subject look good. And if they are shiny and sweaty they're not going to look good. So you've got to get in there, get over the embarrassment of kind of getting in someone's personal space so you might not know very well. You just got to do it. You've got to get in there, get that powder on them. Especially, and this is terrible, but if men are lacking the hair that they might have once had you especially need to get in there and powder that up. I mentioned these other things already. Where should you sit? This is important. I think we've all seen videos where the subject is looking way off screen and it's like, where is that person? Why are they looking all the way to the left? It's because their interviewer wasn't sitting close enough to the camera. Go ahead and sit right down next to the camera and you should be able to just turn your head and kiss the camera. You've got to be that close in order to get the eye line right. Your subject needs to be away from the wall. And this is where having a larger room is going to help you a lot. Go ahead and pull them ideally 10 feet away from the wall behind them. These photos were actually taken in our offices and we didn't get, this is one of our interns, we didn't get her far enough away from the wall to really get good depth. But you can see that there's some depth in here. Framing is important. Here's a whole series of examples of poor framing. Too centered, eye line off to a weird side, too small. Don't cut people's heads off. You can do that later in post-production if you want to cut their head off. A great frame, let's look at one of these. Is this one on the left? You can see I wrote nice. This is actually a rabbi that we shot in New York last summer. And you can see there's a lot of nice depth behind her. We shot her in the synagogue so the location reflects a little bit about who she is, but it's not overwhelming. We also left about an egg's worth of space on top of her head. You can picture a little egg sitting right there. And I like to do that. It really bothers me when someone's cut off right on the top of their head. You can always, in the digital world, very easily push in during the edit to make the frame smaller. But of course you can't go ahead and pull it out if you shoot very tight. So if you see on the lower right-hand side, this is what we call a close-up shot. It's from the top of the head to the chin. If you shoot like this, you'll never be able to get a wider shot. So go ahead and play it safe. Frame the nice, medium close-up. And then in the edit room you can kind of choose to push in at various emotional moments. Again, these tips are for non-professional camera people. Professional camera people do change the frame, but they are very adept with their camera and manage to control it well. If you have that skill level, go for it. If you don't, stay safe. A lot of times people have difficulty with lighting, and there are other TechSoup webinars that look more deeply into three-point lighting. And I know Allie will probably share those with you or the TechSoup team later on. I do want to say one thing though is try to avoid one overhead light that will cast deep shadows. Use multiple lights or even better, try to use diffuse sunlight as your lighting source. Always be sure that subject is not sitting in front of the light, excuse me, with the light behind them because you can see here is what happens when the window is behind the subject. Audio. Man, audio is so important. It's amazing, but people will not watch a video with bad audio and beautiful pictures for the most part. But they will watch a video with great audio and fairly poor picture quality. Audio is something very deeply psychological. It touches us deeply, and we need to hear it clearly. So don't leave it behind. It really is 50% of your video, or even 60, you could say. Microphones are a real challenge for non-professional filmmakers. It's expensive, it's complicated, doesn't make much sense to the lay person, not to me either. If you are able to purchase a microphone, great. Your goal is to get the microphone as close to your subject as possible. You can do this with a lavalier microphone. Those are now I believe being made to plug into a cell phone. A lavalier is something that clips on to someone's shirt. You can do it with plug-in microphones, now plug into cell phones as well. Or a TAS camera, there's something called a Zoom recorder. All of these things will likely record sounds separate from your video, which is a challenge in itself. But they will allow you to get that microphone closer to your subject. But let's say you're just shooting on a consumer camera. Well, this is a challenge because you're using what's called an onboard microphone, a microphone that's embedded into your camera. In that case, you may need to focus more on controlling the space that you're shooting in, and controlling the sound around it. So here's a list of some of the things that can challenge your sound and that you really have no control over. The best control is to not shoot in a location with these issues. However, if you can't help shooting in a school, change the time you're shooting. You know, shoot after school or in the evening or before the kids arrive. If you know that there's a hospital next to your location, you need to change that up. You just can't have ambulances arriving every four minutes or every 10 minutes even without impacting your interview. Don't be afraid to stop the interview and hold for an ambulance or a fire truck or something else. In theory, you can control a lot more. Make sure to unplug all of these machines. We always recommend if you unplug anyone's personal refrigerator or freezer, go ahead and put your car keys in there. And then when you go to leave for the day, you will remember your keys in the fridge and absolutely remember to turn that fridge back on. It's really a bummer to get an email later on informing you that you have caused the death of someone's entire refrigerator. When your subject comes in, there's a couple of things that you're going to want to tell them. One of those things is just a gentle reminder to be sure to look at you and not into the camera directly, unless that's a look you're going for, which most of the time you're not. They should be looking at you, which puts their online right off the edge of the frame. Also remind them to include your answer in their questions. So I always say, if I ask you what you have for breakfast this morning, try to say for breakfast this morning I had toast versus just toast. And you may have to remind people throughout the interview, but it's no problem because repeating things and doing it over is not a worry in the digital age. SD cards, there's no cost there. It's a little more work in the edit room, but that's our job. So be sure to let them know you can restate anything you say, any time, just relax, have fun, don't worry too much about it. If you said something that you didn't like how you presented it, just let me know. We'll go ahead and redo the question. It's really important as a lot of the folks that you'll be interviewing for the Baby Steps competition are not professional presenters. These aren't PR people. They don't necessarily feel always comfortable in front of a camera. So it's really important to let them know. No worries if you're not happy with what you said. Just go ahead and restate it. And then finally, a couple tips for yourself is go ahead and try to, as much as you can, stick to those questions that you wrote down. It's fun and easy to kind of go off on a tangent or be spontaneous and absolutely be a little bit spontaneous, but also keep your eye on the clock. Make sure that at the end of the interview you asked all of those questions. You have to trust yourself that you wrote them with intention and that they were great questions. Oftentimes during an interview sometimes you can start saying, ah, that's not that important. Now I want to talk about this other thing, but you have to trust your past self from last week that you made those questions with some intention in mind. Be sure to get through them. And then always ask at the end, ask your subject, hey, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you'd like to talk about? Before an interview your subject probably has rehearsed some things and has thought about what they might be asked, but maybe you didn't ask this question. So they may have some stuff that comes out that will be really critical to your interview. All right, so that is all we're going to talk about today for interviewing. Now let's look at a few shooting tips. So just a couple quick pointers for shooting usable footage. If you're filming handheld and many of you are with these light DSL cameras, go ahead, picture right now I'm putting my hands in front of myself and I'm pretending to hold a camera and now I'm going to take my elbows and pull them into my chest or the sides of my body. And now if I move myself around I'm much more stable. Go ahead and pull those arms in and stabilize them while shooting handheld. You can also be a human tripod, meaning plant your feet on the ground, move your body from one side to the other as opposed to, let's say I'm like pointing the camera at the door and someone walks in and now I'm using my legs to move my camera with my body. Instead I'm going to plant my feet and just rotate my body. It'll be a much more stable shot. Another thing that is very essential to do is hold each shot steady for 10 seconds. A lot of non-professional camera people tend to film a kid, but it's like for three seconds and then they move on. You're going to have to slow down and just observe at least 10 seconds each shot. A couple interesting shots that I always recommend people think about is getting down on the ground or getting up in the air or inside of things. Find an interesting angle. Not everything needs to be shot with a funky angle, but if you're shooting kids get down on the floor with the kids. If you're shooting people pulling groceries out of a minivan, well this camera person got in the backseat of the minivan. It's really fun when the door is slammed on the minivan. It makes what might not be that interesting a lot more dynamic. And then I have a classroom shot where there was a wooden contraption or a house so the camera person went up the stairs and then filmed from a higher angle. So always try to find an interesting angle. Now I'd like to talk about the seven critical shots that will help you make any video much better. So this is a list of them and what we're going to do is watch a short video that C3 made for the Greater Chicago Food Depository. And this was about Chicago's Community Kitchens, the middle video. So let's go ahead and play it. And in this video we're going to see all of these seven recommended shots and after we show the video I'll go ahead and walk through the seven critical shots to get to make a great scene. My life has changed so dramatically that if you were to see me a year ago I probably wouldn't even look alike. I grew up in Chicago in a section of the city called Logan Square. My mom did not have any education. She worked in factory jobs. She lived with welfare to primarily feed us. We were absolutely hungry all the time. We would eat until the money ran out and then we wouldn't eat. At the time that I got my associate's degree I was in prison. I had a lot of trouble finding work because primarily of my background. Chicago's Community Kitchens is a two-part mission. Part of our mission is a food service job training program. It's also a production kitchen where we produce anywhere from 1,400 to 2,500 meals a day for children and after-school programs throughout Cook County. The students of Chicago's Community Kitchens are residents of Cook County. They are unemployed and underemployed adults seeking a job in the food service industry. The program is very intense. They teach good cutting skills. They teach how to follow a recipe and the temperatures of food, how to store food, how to make food safe to eat. And we're going to lower the egg out of the bowl into the water. Plus they teach you people skills, how to interact in that environment, how to deal with bosses, how to look for a job, how to write a resume. Then they put you in an environment where you can actually utilize those skills when you enter. The internship is an opportunity for the employer to test out potential employees. Is this about the right thing? This is exactly the kind of video I was talking about earlier where you're essentially taking one or two sit-down interviews and then you're building a lot of supplementary footage. You're adding that in and building out the story. You can see we had just about a half a day to shoot with Jason, although I had spent some time with him on the phone before I had never met him. You only have five hours to shoot with someone. So we did an interview and then we filmed him at Chicago's Community Kitchens and then a little bit at the restaurant where he was interning. So we're not able to show what happened in his childhood and really fill in his story. We got to be quick. So these seven essential shots are going to help you fill in any story by showing someone in action moving around in the world, introducing you to their world. So the first and most, or very essential shot, all of them are essential, is an exterior establishing shot. This is what we call a wide shot. So at the top you see here's an exterior of the restaurant and then when we're in the classroom we at least show the full classroom in a wide once. Kim was talking about the Early Explorers Cove and we're going to use that as an example later. If you're filming the Early Explorers Cove you want to get a wide shot where we can see the whole thing before we get in with the kids. We also need to film medium action shots. These are shots of people usually from their size and above or waist and above engaged in action. We can see most of their body not too close in and see them doing stuff. This is why in so many documentaries you'll see people drinking tea suddenly in the middle of their interview. It's not very interesting to just watch someone in an interview. We want to see them in their world. Also critical are listening shots. So you see here's the instructor showing how to poach an egg. Then the second shot up at the top right is our listening shot. There's Jason our subject listening to the instructor and then we go back and show the instructor instructing some more. This is one way of connecting your main subject with other individuals. So you show one person talking, one person listening, back to the person talking. Another shot that's very critical is linking shots. You want to connect your subjects with other people. So here we had students raising their hands. The camera pans over and then you see the teacher is answering something. So when you're looking at filming children and parents don't just film the kid listening to the parent listening to the kid and then the kid talking, but also do a pan from one to the other connecting them. Even better is to pan down one of their arms. If their arms are touching or touching the same object, it's great to pan down the shoulder of a parent, for example, holding a book to the book and then pan back up to the child also holding the book. This really connects them physically in space and emotionally somehow. Another critical shot that will help you is cutaways. This is coverage that relates to your subject, but that doesn't have your subject in it or cover any action. And you can see this in a shot of something on the wall, maybe a book, maybe some critical learning materials. A clock is often used. This will help transition from one scene to the other. Then another great critical shot is an over the shoulder. What is someone doing? Are they writing? Great. I'm going to walk around behind them and film them looking down. So if a parent is working with a child or a teacher with a child, go and film from the child's perspective over the child's shoulder or the parent's shoulder. So let's go back really quick because I think I have six minutes and I'm actually going to play this video again. My life has changed so dramatically that if you were to see me a year ago, I probably wouldn't even look alike. I grew up in Chicago in a section of the city called Logan Square. My mom did not have any education. She worked in factory jobs. She lived with welfare to primarily feed us. We were absolutely hungry all the time. We would eat until the money ran out and then we wouldn't eat. At the time that I got my associate's degree, I was in prison. I had a lot of trouble finding work because primarily of my background. Chicago's Community Kitchens is a two-part mission. Part of our mission is a food service job training program. It's also a production kitchen where we produce anywhere from 1,400 to 2,500 meals a day for children and after-school programs throughout Cook County. The students of Chicago's Community Kitchens are residents of Cook County. They are unemployed and underemployed adults seeking a job in the food service industry. The program is very intense. They teach good cutting skills. They teach you how to follow recipes, the temperatures of food, how to store food, how to make food safe to eat. And we're going to lower the egg out of the bowl into the bowl. Plus, they teach you people's skills, how to interact in that environment, how to deal with bosses, how to look for a job, how to... All right. So one exercise you can do before you go out to shoot your footage is go ahead and create your own what we call of what you might want to cover in a classroom. For example, I put some exercises here. You can look at these later and come up with a situation that's going to happen in that classroom or that situation and then think about all the angles that you need to shoot it at. So for example, if I think about the early Explorers Cove, here was my sample shot list. I'm going to take the Cove... I'm going to shoot the Cove from the door, see the whole wide room. I also want to see a person standing, that's what a wide is. I can see their whole body from the tip of their head to the bottom of their feet. Another shot would be a mother walking across the room with a child in hand. Maybe I'm tracking her or panning with her. I could pan from the child working. So let's say the child is doing one of those hands-on activities that Kim talked about. Maybe the parent's asking the child how something feels. And so maybe I'm looking at the child feeling something and then I pan up to the parent and ideally, at that exact moment, they would say, what do you feel or something? And then I could pan back down to the child connecting those two in the same shot. Same thing, I could shoot them separately. So let's say the educator asking a question. Then I can even hear the child's response off-camera. Stay on the educator who asks another question, then pan down to the child. Sorry, take a separate shot of the child listening to the teacher asking the question. Shots of artwork on the walls or educational toys, signage, maybe a picture that says Early Explorers Cove, just that. A child's hand putting a circle block into a circle hole. This would be a great action shot. And then an over-the-shoulder of maybe the child working from over-the-mother's shoulder would be something that I came up with. And then I went ahead and listened, listed what these are. Oh, you know what? I didn't talk about close-ups. I apologize. Close-up shots are similar to cutaways, and that's where, for example, we saw the eggs in the water. You always want to try to get in really tight on certain things. It's important when you edit and when you shoot to be sure to get a whole variety of wide shots, medium shots, and close-up shots. All right, so a last just couple comments about wrapping up. Before you beam up, I'm a big Star Trek fan, so I like to get some Star Trek in anytime I can. Before you're done for the day, it's not just a matter of finishing shooting and walking out the door. There are some essentials. The first thing is make sure you're not leaving your camera gear, your audio gear, especially your SD cards or your tapes in your car. So, I mean, I know I live in Chicago. I should never, like, I never leave anything in my car. I can't assume my car can get broken into it anytime. That's just a good rule of thumb in life, but never leave your footage in your car. If your car gets stolen or towed or anything happens, you're going to just shoot yourself, that you didn't protect both your gear and especially your captured footage. Make sure your batteries are on the charger at night. The next day when you go back to shoot, you're going to just be so frustrated if your batteries are dead. You can't do anything without batteries. Be sure to label your tapes if you're using them or with your SD cards. Go ahead and upload those onto your computer. Label those files, make copies, put them back up, put them on a hard drive. Great idea to put that hard drive in a different location than your computer if you have a fire at your house and you lose it all. You've really lost a lot. Make sure you set aside some time after you've transferred the footage to your computer. If you need to transcode it, you're going to do that. And I know you guys have a separate post-production webinar. But go ahead and, after it's transcoded and in your editing software, make some time in your life to sit down and watch it, learn from it. Think about what could I have done better? You might even try to edit it together just a little bit before your next shoot so you can go into your next shoot having learned some lessons from your last shoot. And I think that that is all for today. This was, I gave my little pitch about C3 where I work earlier, so I think that we're ready for any questions. Okay, great. Thank you, Tristan. That was great. So let's see. A few questions for you and then I'll handle, just so you guys know, I'll handle some questions for Tristan right now and then I'm going to go back and ask him a couple of questions as well before we end for the day. So Tristan, one thing that came up is wondering how much of the shot list is usually planned out beforehand or is it a matter of filming a bunch of just raw footage going back through the shots? That's a great question. It really depends on your level of professionalism and experience. I think if I was hiring a professional camera person, I actually do make shot lists for my camera person especially because in C3 we're doing client work and we need to make sure that we're getting everything that's going to make our client happy. Our camera person is often much more attuned to visuals and story and that's really important, but for example I need my camera person to get a shot of the exterior the sign of the location. For example, Early Explorers Cove and if there's a foundation that's sponsored it I want to make sure that that foundation's name gets a moment in our video for example. So really the more planning you can do and the more extensive your shot list is the better. Even if you know what you're going to shoot it forces you to really think through the story. We have an expression in film production which is garbage in, garbage out meaning if your pre-production is no good your shoot is probably going to mean no good and that really includes your shot list. I would say in almost all cases it never hurts and it will really expand your story the deeper you can get your shot list. Print it out put it in your pocket, make sure halfway through your shoot you look at it. It's not that you're looking at it during the shoot it's that by thinking about it it's going to happen later. Okay, got it. And also one thing especially filming with children is that they tend to be overly conscious of what's going on around them and somebody is wondering how to film children without them constantly looking over their shoulders at the camera or is that even an issue? Yeah, no that's a huge issue and actually we've done a lot of work with first five years fund and ounce of prevention fund as well as some head start advocacy. We've filmed a lot in ECE classrooms. A couple things. One is I think it's very important at the start of a shoot that the teacher introduces you and your crew and allows the teacher to ask questions. So you should introduce yourselves you should answer a silly question like what's your favorite dessert give the children a few minutes to ask you questions, don't rush it. And then the children will feel much more a part of it. The second thing is spending a bunch of time there. You can't go in with kids and have an agenda where it's like okay I gotta get in and out of here in a half an hour because kids they do need time to show off and stick their tongues out at the camera and be a little silly. It's inevitable and even high school kids in college when the camera shows up is going to either avoid it, be silly, or ask if they're going to be on TV. So you just need to explain very clearly hey I'm making this video for this ECE center we're going to be here for the next three hours filming and then with small children asking them not to look at the camera avoid the camera isn't really something they're probably capable of doing so I don't often even bother with this. If you have a child who's being really problematic then that's kind of something to address individually with the teacher. Usually I would address the teacher rather than the child directly if I'm not a part of that classroom environment. And again just patience, patience, patience. Just knowing that if a child went and picked their nose and you're shot or stuck their tongue out that's ruined but if you just keep filming you'll get those moments. Kids actually are very adaptable to your presence faster than you would imagine. Okay, great. Becky Watson was wondering is there any are there any free editing apps for cell phone videos that you know of? Because I know a lot of people will be using cell phones to take a lot of these videos. Yeah, you know I'm not an expert in that kind of stuff honestly because you know I work within the professional world we have professional editors it's important to note that this is its own specialty it's how do I say there's, you know I've spent years learning it it takes years to learn well the more you can find partners to help you with your videos the better I would say you know we recommend Premiere globally I'm forgetting what the iMovie is good I don't think internet cell phone footage shouldn't be different from other footage it's just more of a matter of kind of getting it onto your computer and once it's on your computer it functions as other footage so it's not particular it doesn't need particularly editing software. Premiere is I think about $200 to buy and then I always recommend linda.com it's lynda.com and it's $25 a month they have maybe thousands but at least 8,000 videos and it will teach you any software out there so go and take the tutorials on iMovie or some kind of software that will be my best recommendation. Okay great thanks I put the website on the chat pane and I'll also be sending it out with that follow up email and we might and just you know, Becky who asked the question we are going to be covering post production next week in our next week's webinar so there's a chance we might be covering some more editing tools at that point as well. Let's see so Cindy, all Nick was wondering if you had any tips on releases what type to use when and how to get them and also Cindy before and as we are also going to be covering that next week as well. Yeah we can send out a few links. Releases is something that even I work at a professional communications firm we actually don't recommend releases specifically to our clients because it's a legal matter that should go through a legal department most of the time or all of the time really. There's a lot of releases online. There's I think I just sent a link out to the TechSoup team from womenmakemovies.com or .org you can just go ahead and google personal appearance release and you'll come up with a whole bunch of stuff. It is critical though when filming children that you get releases from their parents and this needs to be done well in advance. I would recommend sending those to the teacher like three to four weeks in advance explaining who you are, why you'll be in your classroom. Some schools operate that all through their administration so you should give them even more lead time or they get a blanket release from parents at the beginning of the year. Just being aware also that parents who object usually we actually would stick a piece of tape on that kid's back very small or get a photo of them in advance and then be sure not to shoot them while you're shooting and then make sure that picture goes to your editor in case they were in. It's very sensitive matter. Great. So this is another question regarding cell phone usage I'm not sure. You know cell phone use would you recommend that people use a plug-in mic like what you're saying like a lavalier mic and not just use the audio through whatever app they're using on the cell phone when they're shooting a video if they are? Yes. On a cell phone when I was talking about an onboard microphone that is an onboard microphone meaning it's attached to the device you're shooting on. And then do you have because a lot of this was interview based video that you were talking about because of course that's what most documentaries are but some of the videos that you created for Baby Steps might not be interview based. Do you have any specific tips for framing that video as opposed to an interview based video? No. I think the seven shots are critical for any scene that you're going to film no matter what it is. I guess something that I learned a camera person gave a seminar I attended once it was really a great idea if you have two family members or friends that can play a game together whether it's chess or maybe they're even tossing a ball back and forth and go ahead and film them as a practice run with those seven shots and then edit it together into a scene. So let's say the video is going to be two people kicking a ball at one point one of them misses the ball you know runs off comes back maybe gets kind of annoyed at the other and then they keep playing peacefully go ahead and shoot that scene with your friends and then edit it together and that will really help you understand the kind of shots you need to make that a compelling story. Okay. Total sense. And then I wanted I did want to go to a couple of questions we have for Kim really quick and then I'm going to come back to you Tristan. So Kim regarding the California Academy of Sciences I know you talked a lot about the the Cove what is the Cove free are all the resources free at the California Academy of Sciences? It is we do a lot of institutions will charge you one fee to get into the front door and then if you want to see other things or enter in other spaces you'd have to pay more. What we do is we actually just do one blanket fee and then so anything on the public floor is free of charge the other floor the Cove is open to anybody to come in we just have a limitation on the number of people allowed in at any given time just for the overall enjoyment of the children in the space we don't want to have too many people in there and so generally there could be a line for that things like the planetarium show it's all free it's just you'd have to kind of reserve a spot so you can get a ticket for a certain time that you want to go in and see the show we do have programs that we do also and those some are free and some are fee based and those are things that you can find online and if there is a fee for it they'll ask you to register beforehand for it okay great thanks and then for those of those of us in the audience who are not in the California area do you have any resources on the website that will help parents and other early childhood educators in engaging with their kids that we can look at and use at home we do we actually have an at home activities tab and we actually have a special page specifically for teachers and parents and that's for anybody to go on and we have examples of activities that we've done and you know it's the full write up on it as well as ideas on how to extend the learning from that activity and again we try to you know anything that we put online for the general public use we try to make sure that there are things that you can do at home or outside there's no need to buy special things for it per se okay great thanks the website that you just talked about with the resources I'll make sure and include that on the follow up email that goes out to everybody so everybody will have that resource as well that will be sent out in the email this afternoon and then I think we have time for one more question so this question is to Tristan again so are there any key differences to interviewing children like with the questions that you would ask or with how you would position the camera are there any key differences when interviewing children versus adults I know we talked a little bit about attention but I wasn't sure about the interview process yeah I mean you know I haven't interviewed a lot of kids myself in a formal way in fact I don't know if I've ever interviewed a child in a formal sit down way oh you know I've interviewed a lot of high school students I guess if there's a maturity level they're the same as adults and if they're not they're going to be especially nervous and I would consider interviewing a child more just in the classroom on the side what we call on the fly interviews OTS I'm in the hallway and make it casual so that they're not really nervous you know make sure your camera is at their height that you're looking straight on versus looking down other than that no I think just keeping your question simple I think with kids you're going to want to let them kind of guide the discussion more than you would it's really hard to force a kid to go in a certain direction so you know just being aware of that right great well with that I think that our time is almost up I do really want to thank both Tristan and Kim for their participation in today's webinar both of their sections were really really valuable and we completely appreciate your your time today and I really want to thank everybody on the back end for Ali Pasekian and Becky Wiegand I want to thank both of you today for your help and your assistance on the back end and of course thank everybody who attended today for their attention and their time I know your time is valuable I do also want to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk of course we're using ReadyTalk as a webinar platform today and I really want to thank them for their assistance and support and of course as a reminder when you do exit out of this webinar you can just jump up and if you could take just a couple of minutes of your time to fill that out it really does help us in producing better webinars in the future and of course as a reminder we did record today's session and we will be sending out the recording as well as additional resources later today at the latest tomorrow morning so again thank you all thank you Kim and Tristan Thank you