I sat in on a judging today for Fresh Cut 2009-a video competition for high school students. As a mom of two very young kids, I was so intrigued by what I saw. Entertained. Enlighted. Inspired. There are limitations on the videos where length and copyright information are concerned, but a new twist this year was that we added the idea of a theme. We asked that students make the obvious (or not so obvious) theme of their films to be "change". Now, I've only seen a small glimpse of the submissions thus far and I hope to see more as the judging takes place this week, but it really makes you think about the word -change- and the many different ways you can portray that in a five minute time period.
These kids are in high school and some of the messages are very...well, mature. They are well thought out and I am very impressed with how they use this small amount of time to get their thought process across the screen. They are opening my mind in a way that only kids can.
Filmmaking really is an art, many shows and movies I've seen remind me of that often. These kids (are they too young to call "kids"?) may be artists in the budding stages of development and what fun it is to see their work now. What if we have the next Ken Burns right here in our community?
I think I'm going to buy my 3-year-old a Flip camera this weekend---it is never too early to start them on the creative path.
