I had a theory I hoped was true: that kids, in spite of the explosion of technology and media, with the attendant fracturing of their already fleeting attention spans, still loved making things by hand, playing, using their imaginations to come up with new and often ridiculous ideas.  I was looking for these ridiculous ideas, counting on them.

Let me back up.  I did not have this theory because I am an educational theorist or anyone paid to have such theories.  I was inventing the career I had always wanted, being in a room full of children and giving them permission to set their imaginations free, as my imagination and complete concentration were also engaged.  My idea was to give them the setting to be creative, listen to them and help them invent, experiment and express what they wanted to say.   The motivation would come from the intrinsic excitement of being freed to create by someone who would encourage even their most absurd ideas.

I was delighted to find my theory was true, kids, in an even modestly supportive setting, will run under their imaginations like tiny maniacs flying ridiculous and ungainly kites.  That these ridiculous and ungainly kites often actually fly gives me no end of happiness.

I designed a workshop that kids could run themselves.  The technology was simple, and came last, used merely to assemble the final product.  Ideas and things made by hand were worked out, choreographed, tried and shot.  But here came the devilish part of my plan: kids had to focus to make their ideas look good, once they figured out how they wanted to make their ideas come to life.  

They had to light things properly, frame them well, focus the camera, shoot the frames with a steady hand, not shake the sensitive rig the camera is suspended by.  If any of these things was not done with care, if a kid even jostled the animation stand during shooting, the final product would be unacceptable, unsatisfying.  If the editor wasn’t paying attention, very cool animation would never be seen.  The skill of the editor is as important in this kind of quick form animation as the skill of any other artist in the room.

Free play and focused attention to detail, in almost equal parts, equals cool animation.  In the short amount of time we had each session to perform this experiment it was crucial that the kids worked in teams.  Two kids set up the lights and camera stands while another set up the computer.  Other kids set about arranging the materials.  Within minutes children were drawing, cutting, sculpting, writing, shooting, editing.  The classroom was turned into a beehive of activity, most of it in the service of stop-motion animation.

Some of these early sessions would be so productive and exciting the kids would be drunk by the end.  Slap happy, giddy and out of control, laughing and rolling on the floor.  I didn’t take pains to stop the drunken hilarity, except when it got really wild, because I understood exactly why they felt intoxicated.  I was reminded, too late, that drunken hilarity is never a good thing.  For one thing, it causes terror in anyone passing by, to see kids laughing, wrestling, rolling on the floor, in a pile, singing like drunks, no matter how justified those kids might be in acting that way.  

In my excitement at how quickly the children took over all aspects of production, literally by week two, I neglected to implement the crucial thing I’d learned at great cost over twenty years earlier:  the adult must ultimately be able to ask the children to be quiet when needed, and the children must be quiet.  If this is not instilled at the first meeting, reinforced at the second, the consequence for a kid acting like a prick swiftly and unemotionally enforced whenever necessary, the well-meaning adult will find himself in a room full of young cannibals it will be impossible to influence or direct, beyond a certain point.   I can’t fault myself for this, I was attending to a hundred other details at any given time and I forgive myself for forgetting to attend to this crucial detail,  one I won’t neglect again, but it meant the initial group was often a real pain in the ass to work with, for all their childish delight and invention.

A year ago, when I sent out an animated example of the children’s wild creativity, I got this email from someone I rarely hear from:

This stuff is amazing! You have unleashed in them pure unspoiled creative energy. You must be very excited.

I probably should have been very excited, and I was, excited and encouraged, but for the fact that I was making $90 a week.  I also had no idea how to find other schools, and though determined to work in public schools, I also intimately know the kinds of creatures most school administrators are.  They are the kind who pass rooms where kids are laughing, singing and lying on the floor and tell somebody to do something about this.

Why am I writing this here?  Because I have to prepare a focused presentation of the program, with 15 minutes or so of animation, for the day after tomorrow.  The presentation is a shot in the dark, to be fired from my blunderbuss in a basement room where one mother of a young animator is an elementary school principal.  I see this as a good chance to practice presenting the program to someone who might possibly want to hire it for her school.

The program was not picked up for a fourth semester by the school where the kids were giddy so often, I didn’t even get to say goodbye to those kids, many of whom I’d worked with weekly for a year and a half.   So much success reduced to a squeamish concern over occasional giddiness, by people who’d never seen the animation the kids created or been present in the student-run workshop where kids autonomously produced all aspects of the animation.  It is by no means atypical, this aversion to things not tightly controlled, a sense of order is much more comfortable than the appearance of chaos. 

The things sacrificed for a sense of order is why I launched the program to begin with: to prove what kids that society tightly controls and soon throws away have in their hearts and minds, and how creatively they can express those things when given the chance.

We live in a time and place where children, particularly in the besieged public schools, are not given a chance to do much but be tested, failed and slotted for a graduate program of misery and a truncated life expectancy.  Like “collateral damage” to describe innocent civilians killed in wars usually launched to benefit the wealthy of the attacking country, these children are labeled “at risk”.  At one time there was a lot of money earmarked for programs geared to improving attendance, literacy, decreasing the drop out rate among “at risk” kids.  It was to this tit I’d intended to fasten my parched lips as I got the program rolling in some of the worst public schools in the city.  

To this phantom tit, boys and girls.

“The tit is still out there,” the reasonable will insist, and you are probably right.  I am not a boy with a bloated stomach and flies crawling on his eyes, I can wait for my turn.  It’s not a question of patience or impatience, it’s more a need for some measurable success after several years of hard, and unpaid, work.  Our market society is based on profit and loss, and metrics.  Metrics, every philanthropist knows, are the difference between investing in something with real measurable potential and being swayed, unprofitably, by someone’s emotional dream.  Might be a beautiful dream, but metrics make the world go around, at least the world people get paid to play in.

So I have six sessions left between the two schools and then no prospects on the horizon.  One session will be Wednesday’s ‘animation festival’, then one more with this great group of kids who work together, have great fun, are amenable to suggestions, and who are never wild.  The woman who hired us for a summer camp last summer, and for three ten week sessions at two schools this year, including this one, was seemingly a fan of the program.   Three weeks ago, to the shock of her employees, this beautiful 34 year-old mother and educator died of a cancer none of them knew she had.  

The ‘festival’ was already in the works.  A chance for parents to come in, see a bunch of animation done by their kids, in a very short weekly session, hear a spirited and entertaining rap by the well-spoken, sometimes humorous, facilitator of the workshop, also the founder and creator of the program.

“And after that the kids will show the parents how to animate,” said the well-spoken, sometimes humorous, facilitator of the workshop.  And the late CEO’s protegee smiled her radiant smile, and nodded, and said it would be a cool idea.  I’ve done it before, it went well the last time.

The whole program will be one hour long.  I will speak for two minutes, set up the first one, dim the lights, show a 2:00 animation.   The parents will cluck and the kids will be happy.  I’ll give the kids the chance to say whatever they want to about it.  In my pocket a digital recorder will capture all their comments for later use in promotional clips.  I have signed permissions from each of the parents in a folder.  

I’ll introduce the next clip, then dim the lights and show it.  Another short round of kibbitzing and smiles, I’ll have someone pass out the Dunkin’ Munchkins.  Four or five more clips, most of them already in the can, each highlighting a different aspect of what we’ve been doing so far, four or five more breaks for short comments, and then we’ll have the kids wash their sticky hands (remember to pick up a bottle of Purell and a wad of paper towels) and throw the workshop open to the young animators, who show their parents how it’s done, let them try their hand at the process.  Their children will show them the frames coming to life in the camera’s viewer.

“I will have this edited and on youTube by the weekend,” I’ll tell them as they leave, getting their email addresses so I can send them the URL, shaking their hands. 

Something I can do in my sleep, talk about the program.  But I can’t write out my outline, choose the films.  I am thinking of the precariousness of the whole enterprise much more than its great potential, much of it already demonstrated.   I am thinking that I am paying two kids the entire fee I’m collecting to run the second one-hour workshop, even though I am still doing most of the work in running it.  The kid who’s getting my $90 fee is putting in about ninety distracted minutes a week for that money, I used to put in about five hours.  The assistant is getting $30, the same thing I paid the assistant for the two hour session.  I am getting virtually nothing, but the proof, with luck, that the workshop is scalable, can be run by people I train.

What must they know?   What it feels like to be creative, and how to encourage creativity.  And children don’t need much encouragement in that area, truly.  The adult must know that her first duty is to listen to and help the children, the teaching aspect is truly minimal.  They teach mostly by their example, the way they are present, and friendly, and the way they listen and help.  They model the behavior we hope to encourage in the children.

So I try to fool myself here, as I cannot attack this important task head on.  I write this, and hope I’ll come up with something like this:

“Hello and welcome to the student-run animation workshop.  This program is designed to allow the children to describe their ideas to adults who will help them, if they need help.  Most of the time the only help the kids need is a tiny bit of encouragement when they are not sure their idea is good.   Trying new ideas is a good thing and we encourage it.  There are very few ideas that kids come up with that we wind up having to discourage, usually involving violence — and there is usually a way to save the good part of even a very troubling idea.

I’m going to let the children’s animation speak for itself.  We have a larger screen that I was planning to bring today, but I am going to a wake right after this and the logistics were impossible, so you will have to get a little closer to the screen and use your imagination as you watch on this laptop.  Picture yourself in a little theatre, watching this on a big screen with a great sound system.  Forget for a moment that all of what you are about to see was made in a very, very short time by children, meeting once a week, who had never done animation before.  Picture what they could do if we had time to talk about stories they want to tell, and make characters, and scenery, and revisit some of these great ideas they come up with week after week.

Or, better than that, forget everything I’ve just said and enjoy watching your children’s imaginations come to life.   We enjoy it greatly every week.  They’re a great and creative group of kids and it’s a pleasure to work with them.   In fact, they are going to teach you how to animate in a few minutes.  Lights please, Tim.”