Community Notebook

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Children's Media Project

Tim and the Animation Crew

Rohan Brown, a 17-year-old Poughkeepsie High School student was sleeping in his guidance counselor’s office when he was approached by Tim Sutton and Ben Kalina from Children’s Media Project (CMP).
They told Rohan to stop by their new location at 366 Main St., Poughkeepsie to check the place out and see if he would be interested in any of their programs.

Rohan took them up on their offer, and brought his friend Will Wright along with him. After some talking, Rohan and Will teamed up with CMP to make a documentary about the reconstruction of Poughkeepsie’s Main Street.

“We’re gonna film everything and interview the business owners to see how they think it will effect them,” Rohan said.

CMP, which is a non-profit organization, also runs public workshops, attends national teaching conferences and hosts the children’s portion of the Hampton’s International Film Festival to reach larger audiences.

“The school system isn’t set up to give kids an outlet for creative wealth,” explained Maria Marewski, the founder of CMP, “and I believe that kids know how to read in what I consider a visual language and think that it’s important for them to be able to write in that language also; we let them do that.”

An example of what Maria is talking about is something called Animated Learning, a program CMP just completed with fifth-graders in the Beacon City School District who were learning geography. The students each chose a state that they wanted to research, then after they had enough information, wrote a story about it. The story’s characters, along with other objects they created to represent certain things, such as cotton-balls for clouds, were put onto a poster-board background and then animated by recording small moves individually. Next, they digitized these moves on one of CMP’s computers to make a videotape of their movie which they were able to take home with them.

“This is a really useful process for the kids because what they do is take ownership over the whole learning process,” Marewski explained, stressing, “It engages them.”

CMP has presented their Animated Learning technique at national conferences as well as at local workshops. They just received funding from the Dyson Foundation, allowing them to run Media Literacy, Mentoring (kids get to propose a project idea, and if approved they are assisted in making it a reality), and children’s bookmaking workshops for seven to ten year-olds.

CMP, which originally started out of Marewski’s attic in 1994, moved to Main Street in Poughkeepsie last fall. Sutton explained that some people look at Main Street as a “bad” place and that they wanted “to help bring back the community.”

Being on Main Street, and open Monday through Saturday from 9-5, kids walk in all the time just to show them a drawing they made. In fact, kids create all the drawings hanging on the walls at CMP. Kids do this because they are encouraged to pursue whatever they’re interested in, whether in form of a drawing, a poem, music or whatever.

“We’re trying to offer every outlet we can for them,” Ben Kalina, a Vassar graduate who has been with CMP for two years said. He explained that today’s media is used to separate people by not involving two-way communication, and then described a program they are running now at Poughkeepsie High School where they teach kids how to analyze this information penetrating their life. They’re deconstructing tobacco ads to see the tools advertisers use to sell the product. After they ‘tear’ the advertisements apart, they’re going to make ads of their own—counter-ads. “Knowing this gives them the tools to fight back,” he concluded.

CMP’s team consists of six full-time administrators, 14 part-time art teachers and a handful of college-interns. Their duties include teacher training, in which they help teachers to integrate media arts into their classrooms; working with a program called Video Diary For Girls, where they teach girls to create counter-marketing strategies for any personal issues they may have (usually sparked by today’s media); running hands-on animation and editing workshops; teaching media literacy to enable kids how to recognize advertising tactics (i.e. tobacco exercise described above); and Talking Walls, a program funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (who also funds PBS and NPR).

CMP considers this funding—for the second year now—an honor because the MacArthur Foundation praised them for actually listening to the kids and including them in the projects, as opposed to merely telling them what to do. Talking Walls acknowledges that adolescents need people they can talk to and share with. Kids in this program learn to play the drums, write poems, spoken-word or anything else that interests them. Then they share it with each other and the community.

“It lets them be part of a group,” Kalina explained.

Parents and teachers praise CMP every day, claiming “What you’re doing is making the kids perform better at school and at home.” Kalina, Sutton and Marewski all proclaim that the most important part of their job is empowering the youth and community.

“These kids are excited to learn,” expressed Tim, “and it’s not every day you can help someone and have a good time doing it.”

“I think the mentoring work is really the core of what they do,” said Marewski, who started CMP after moving from Manhattan where she was a filmmaker.

“It was just as I was taking off,” she recalled, referring to the completion of a documentary and the birth of her first child. After moving to Wappingers Falls, she had a second child and suddenly considered herself a “frustrated filmmaker.”

“I thought that since I couldn’t make films, let me at least teach kids how to do it,” and with growing success, that’s exactly what she did.

CMP will have a ribbon cutting ceremony for their new Main Street location on March 6th from 3-7. All are invited to join them and Poughkeepsie’s Mayor Colette LaFuente for the celebrations.
For more information about the ceremony or any of CMP’s programs, call Tim Sutton at 485-4480.
—Josh Ripp