Comment

Spotlight on World Education's #Pages4Progress

The following is a guest blog post from World Education, an International Dot Day partner. World Education is an international nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of the poor through education, and economic and social development programs.

World Education’s #Pages4Progress campaign builds awareness about the critical need to improve access to education around the globe.

The #Pages4Progress and International Dot Day communities are partnering to help millions of people around the world who cannot read or write.

Participating in #Pages4Progress helps raise both awareness and funds that enable World Education to continue to build communities’ capacity to improve access to high-quality education. A few examples include:

  • Basic education, technology, and livelihoods training for migrant youth in Indonesia;
  • Education and critical support services ranging from health care, child protection, and psychosocial support for orphaned and vulnerable children in Swaziland and Zimbabwe; and
  • Training for job-readiness, literacy skills, and college mentoring for adult learners in the U.S.

World Education is delighted to join forces with the International Dot Day community and invite all of you to participate in our #Pages4Progress campaign to Make Your Mark for education and literacy!  

Participating in #Pages4Progress is really simple. Register and submit the pages you’ve read this summer at pages4progress.worlded.org. Together, we can help improve the lives of the poor through education.

Here are three easy steps to #MakeYourMark for millions of people around the world who cannot read or write:

  1. Sign up and log the pages you read at pages4progress.worlded.org and help us reach as many pages as possible by International Dot Day on September 15.
  2. Tell us why reading is important to you. Use the hashtag #Pages4Progress to share on social media (and make sure your post is public so we can see it).
  3. Make a donation to World Education to support our global education programs.

Join #Pages4Progress today! We need EVERYONE'S creative energy to solve the issues around global literacy and education.

Comment

Comment

September FableFriday: Karen Bresnahan, Executive Producer

Here’s the thing about Karen Bresnahan, FableVision Studios’ executive producer: you can’t help but like her. Which is a good thing, since she’s integral to running a ship-shape crew of FableVisionaries.

Karen has been with FableVision since its inception and has watched the studio grow both in size and abilities.

“In the beginning we held the company together with love and paper clips, but now there is a solid business structure in place,” she said.

Her history with the company gives her an invaluable perspective on internal and external affairs – it’s her job to say, “That was fantastic. How can we do it better next time?”

As the head of our production team, she oversees all aspects of our projects from project manager to budget milestone to technical deliverable. As September’s FableFriday, we chatted with Karen about her passion for rock ‘n’ roll, work with NASA (seriously!), her packed daily schedule, and how her touch on every project is filled with craft and caring.

What makes FableVision unique?
FableVision truly follows our mission to bring the world to a better place in every sense – from the projects we take on, to the way employees are treated, to the office culture.

You were once a science teacher? Can you talk a bit about that time in your life? Why make the switch to communications?
I had just graduated from college with a bachelor’s in biology and a New York State teaching certificate. I lived in Buffalo at the time and got a job as an 8th grade science teacher.  Then three years later, when I moved to San Jose, California, I decided I had enough of being in front of kids in a classroom and wanted to be in front of adults doing the news on TV. So I started graduate studies in communication.

You once worked on video and film production, can you share a fun story from that experience?
I had a lot of fun in the early ’80s, producing a series of rock videos with local bands including The Joe Perry Project (no Aerosmith, no Steven Tyler).  We came up with all kinds of crazy scenes including inside an underground bunker in Winthrop, keying a band into a toy farm set, and choreographing a crowd dance through the streets of Salem. I had a different kind of fun in the early ’90s when I worked at a film company with a contract with NASA and got to shoot at just about every NASA facility in the country.

What is your journey to FableVision story?
I started in Boston media as a video production assistant (never got the TV news job), became a video producer, met Paul Reynolds [FableVision co-founder and CEO] through the ITVA organization, and went on to become an interactive producer. Then Paul hired me to work at CF Video with Gary Goldberger [FableVision co-founder and president] at the time when Peter H. Reynolds [FableVision founder] arrived with his ideas for FableVision. When the company was founded, I followed a freelance-to-full-time path across the hall, and never left.

What is your favorite project that you’ve served as producer on?
A series of educational programs for Carnegie Hall that included animated movies about the history of the hall, percussion, wind, brass, and string instruments, a website, and several interactive games. Traveling with the team to Carnegie Hall several times to see the audience interact with live performers and our media was a project highlight.

You’ve been part of hiring every producer currently on our team. Any words of wisdom for people interested in production or project management? What qualities do you look for in new hires?
Participate in as much production as you can in school or on your own, show what you’ve done, and have stories to tell.

I look for smart, proactive, kind, confident, and passionate.

From budgets to managing a team of producers, you have a lot on your plate, can you walk us through a typical day?
8:30 a.m. Get into the office, make tea, check email, and organize to-do list.
9:00 a.m. Answer many emails, including an email question from a client about a proposal we sent.
9:30 a.m. Meet with a producer to start a new project.
10:00 a.m. Complete a budget for a new game.
10:30 a.m. Start a budget for an animation project.
11:00 a.m. Write the scope section for a proposal including production assumptions, a timeline, and a cost breakdown.
11:30 a.m. Meet with a client who is in the studio for a project kickoff.
12:00 p.m. Brainstorm ideas for a website activity to present to a client.
12:30 p.m. Walk somewhere to get lunch and bring it back to my desk.
1:00 p.m. Review and offer feedback to a game design document.
1:30 p.m. Write a performance review for a team member.
2:00 p.m. Meet virtually with a user experience designer to determine if she is right to add to our project team.
2:30 p.m. Prioritize and juggle team members’ time on the weekly and long-term studio schedules.
3:00 p.m. Complete writing a statement of work for a new project.
3:30 p.m. Meet with producers about process improvement and to share best practices.
4:00 p.m. Call with a client about their next project.
4:30 p.m. Review and track current project budgets and follow up with FableVision producers where helpful.
4:55 p.m. Wash my teacup and water glass, walk to the train station.

How do you balance the creative with the budget?
Keep the budget in mind when suggesting creative and reviewing the approach, but remain open to great ideas that might mean juggling priorities.

Look at your desk at work and list five items from it. Then, take a sentence or two to describe what those items say about you.

  1. My 15” MacBook Pro Retina – I cannot work without it. Plus it contains the archival history of production at FableVision.
  2. At-A-Glance 2015 calendar book – This is probably my 18th iteration and even with Google and Apple Calendars, I plan my life with this book.
  3. Reading glasses – ‘Nuff said.
  4. A jar of local honey – Can’t have my tea without it.
  5. Two bobble head Red Sox dolls – gifts from co-workers who know how much I love and follow our team.

Favorites!

Month: June. I love summer and the longest day of the year.
Album: It’s too difficult for me to choose one. I have hundreds of albums, CDs, and digital downloads that are favorites. I listened to the radio at the start of rock ‘n’ roll music, and for me it was an immediate and lasting love.
Concert: The Bridges to Babylon Tour – Rolling Stones – October, 1997 – 5th row – Foxboro, MA
Food: Popcorn
Hike: Crested Butte, Colorado around Lake Irwin
Vacation: A trip to Italy for my 50th birthday. Everything there was so much older than me.
TV shows:
A very long time ago = American Bandstand (from Philadelphia)
A while ago = Twin Peaks
Recently = Friday Night Lights
Now = Nashville

Comment

Comment

Making Headlines: Go Behind the Scenes at Zoombiniville

Zoombinis has been in the app store for almost a month, but the excitement hasn’t died down. We’re thrilled about the game, and we’re not the only ones!

“The second I saw the little blue characters, complete with a variety of hair, eyes, nose color and feet, I was transported back to my childhood. Zoombinis is coming back,” wrote Jessica Bartlett, reporter for the Boston Business Journal.

Lots of people agree – it's been one big, wonderful, nostalgic trip to Zoombiniville.

Boing Boing picked Zoombinis as Mobile Game of the Week.

“Zoombinis remains a wonderful game, and if I could figure it out and be transfixed by it as a young person there's no reason today's players of all ages won't be able to be drawn in,” Leigh Alexander, of Boing Boing, remarked.

To promote the release of Zoombinis, FableVision released a series of developer diary videos that provided a glimpse of our work along the way (you can watch them all here), but if you want a deeper look at what FableVision contributed to Zoombinis production, you’re in luck.

Still don’t know what we’re talking about? USA Today writer Greg Toppo gave a great history of the Zoombinis game and our development collaboration with TERC, and Learning Games Network, including original Zoombinis creator, Scot Osterweil. You can read that article here.

Curious about what others are saying? Read some of our favorite pieces:
Entertainment Weekly
Teachers with Apps
Kidscreen
BetaBoston
The iPad Guide

Comment

Comment

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

From cycling in Brussels to kayaking in Maine, folks at FableVision have had quite a summer. Marking the end of the warm season in New England, we’ve decided to share some of our highlights from our summer vacations.

Taryn Johnson, Production Artist and Animator
“In May, I visited a friend who lives in Brussels! I also got the chance to explore Amsterdam, Bruges, and Paris. There were so many great moments that it's hard to pick one, but one of my favorites was riding a bicycle through the Belgian countryside and saying 'hello' to all the cows. There was also a nice moment reading in a magical bookstore in Paris with a little white cat sleeping next to me.”

Didi Hatcher, Lead Animator
“In May my husband Aaron and I took our daughter Katya to Bulgaria for the first time to meet that side of her family. We got four generations of women together for the first time. Having Mini Me roam around my childhood stomping grounds and play with my old toys was a weird but very cool experience.”

Sarah Ditkoff, Communications and Development Strategist
“My annual trip to Cape Cod was filled with lobster rolls, puppies, trips to light houses and windmills, and mini golf. It's a hard week to beat, I look forward to it every season. I also took a lot of trips to Wilson Farm, which is up by my parents' place, and took a calligraphy and watercolor class.”

Anny Din, Production Assistant
"This summer I decided to try something new. I modeled in a fashion show for a local Boston designer, Keisha Jean-Louis. The name of her clothing brand is QueensKnow. I really loved her philosophy and purpose for creating the brand which was created to empower and promote women of all different shapes and sizes to love themselves. I'm usually the one behind-the-scenes organizing events and projects so I figured I'd give it a shot to be on the opposite side of things as the talent. I'm so happy I chose to model in the show and it gave me a new confidence. You don't have to look like Cindy Crawford to be beautiful."

Brian Grossman, Technical Director
“My summer has been highlighted with a few local adventures, including a trip to Newport, RI with my wife’s family, a family camping trip to Cape Cod, and some fun day trips in and around Boston."

Karen Bresnahan, Executive Producer
“On my summer vacation, I went to Crested Butte to visit my daughter and granddaughters. Crested Butte is a small town located in the western part of Colorado, over 9,000 feet above the sea level of Boston, and surrounded by Rocky Mountains. We hiked, biked, went to outdoor concerts, walked around town, watched movies, and played games. It was non-stop fun for me.”

Michael Lin, QA/IT Specialist
“In my spare time, I perform as a Foley (live sound effects) artist with a local radio drama troupe. This summer, we put on our traditional mystery adaptations featuring famous literary detectives. Every show, I get to learn new tricks to bring to the Foley table, and this time I had the privilege of making the accompanying sound effects to a stabbing murder. I won't give away the secrets of how it was done, but I will say that many brave melons gave their lives to ensure we didn't have to stab any actors onstage.”

Andrea Calvin, Brand and Development Strategist
"My summer vacation travel happened a bit early this year. In May I visited my best friend in San Francisco. We explored all the literary hot spots and tourist traps. But the best discovery happened when we were searching for a restroom and cup of coffee. We stumbled onto the ILM campus and found the Yoda Statue."

Keith Zulawnik, Lead Artist
“This summer, my family rented a cabin right next to Portage Lake in Maine. We saw loons, bald eagles, and were on kayaks for the majority of the week. And, to make our summer complete, we took in a Red Sox game.”

Comment

Comment

Who put the pop in your “Good Thinking!” culture?

A Master’s Degree in Popular Culture is not only a great ice-breaker at parties (and a surefire way to strike fear in the hearts of your parents), but it turns out to be very useful when developing an animated series for teachers about science misconceptions. Who knew? 

Before we dive in to how pop culture shaped the Smithsonian Science Education Center’s Good Thinking!: The Science of Teaching Science series, how about a quick lesson? I’m sure Ms. Reyes would approve.

Popular culture is often described as the “cultural glue” that bonds people from all walks of life together through a shared experience. For example, whether you live in Topeka or Tribeca, are 23 or 67, are a retired homemaker or a club promoter, if you both watched the series finale of Mad Men (sob), you have a common point of reference to draw upon should you meet at an airport luggage carousel. If you happen to inhabit another planet in a different galaxy, a Kardashian reference would most likely be your entry into the conversation. 

That’s in part why popular culture references – pointing to another body of work, fictional character, or well-know event – are so abundant in movies and on television. It adds another layer of enjoyment, a wink to the audience that makes them feel knowledgeable or “in on the joke.” 

Bugs Bunny was a frequent borrower of cultural references (weirdly highbrow ones, like the Barber of Seville and Richard Wagner), but it was The Simpsons that really set the bar for animated television laden with pop culture references. I love the rapid-fire references in Family Guy, but one could argue that there’s very little original text holding all that self-congratulatory smugness together. But I also enjoyed Ted 2, so I clearly can’t be trusted. 

And this brings us full circle to Good Thinking!: The Science of Teaching Science (How? A talking teddy bear and a talking piece of chewed gum, obviously), and how and why we used popular culture references in the series.  

Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) launched the Good Thinking! series to explore pedagogical ideas across a range of subject-matter topics like energy, natural selection, and gravity, as well as cognitive research findings on topics such as student motivation, or the myth of left- and right-brained people, earlier this summer. It’s an engaging and entertaining web series designed to enhance K-8 science education, and deepen understanding of STEM topics for teachers and students alike.

The Smithsonian’s bold, brave, and awesome decision to make Good Thinking! an animated series (versus live action) not only gave the team at FableVision license to borrow from some of the best classic series, it also set audience (more on them in a bit) expectations. Viewers knew they were in for a something a little wacky and fun – a big departure from run of the mill professional development videos.  

Animation is a good approach to reduce the stress and apprehension around learning complex information. If animation allows the audience to let their guard down a bit, they will hopefully realize that science can be a ton of fun, and pass that same mindset on to their students. 

From the beginning, we drew on popular culture to shape Good Thinking!’s world and characters while keeping the audience in mind. 

Speaking of audience, the huge network of teachers tuning into the series is incredibly diverse — gender, age, geography, race, student population, economic status, subject matter expertise. While we can’t make a “one size fits all” experience, popular culture references are a good point of entry for people to rally around. (Remember a few paragraphs up about how pop culture is “cultural glue?”) The important thing is not to overuse them, or to make them so obscure that the creators are the only ones “in on the joke.”  In that sense, cultural phenomenon that have made their way into the pop culture lexicon (like Twilight featured in the Natural Selection episode) make good broad references. 

In creating the series, our major inspirations were the 1950s Tex Avery House of Tomorrow and Farm of Tomorrow cartoons featuring the omniscient “golden voiced” narrator and clever visual and verbal puns and gags, and the talking inanimate objects (Globey, Chairry, Clocky) from Pee-wees’s Playhouse. All of the inanimate objects that spring to life in Ms. Reyes’ classroom were based on well known actors and fictional characters (you can read more about them here) as a way to make THEM feel familiar and relatable, even when the complex scientific info they’re dispensing might not be.  

We tried to lean on references/jokes teachers would be familiar with, not just because of their own personal experiences, but because these things have become so entrenched in media representations of teaching and classrooms — so meta, I know. 

From seasonal classroom decorating to the horror show of the fridge in the teacher’s lounge, from the “secret” side of teachers that comes out when the kids go home (Ms. Reyes’ goth phase in Make it Rain!, or nod to Mad Max in Fired Up About Energy) to the “teacher’s pet” whose hand is in a perpetual state of up-ness, there are hopefully some moments in every episode that ring true.. 

darwin_ssecgoodthinking

A few more pop culture rules for the road: it’s critical the episodes and the writing stand on their own, and even if you don’t “get the reference,” the scene is enjoyable and the information presented is clear. For example, in the Natural Selection episode, Charles Darwin serves Ms. Isabella Reyes and Blossom, umbrella drinks poolside in Isabella’s daydream. It’s a funny gag if you make the connection, but nothing is lost if you miss it. 

And as tempting as it is to use hot “of the moment” references to seem hip and relevant, the series needs to live for a long time and not feel dated. That’s why I can mention doing the “Whip/Nae Nae” in this blog post, but Gummerson and Bunsen may NOT discuss their mutual heartbreak over the Affleck/Garner uncoupling. 

The Good Thinking! series is one of many projects where we have “gone to the pop culture well” for inspiration. Bite Club, a financial literacy game that teaches about retirement savings, is set in a Vampire nightclub similar to Fangtasia in the TV show True Blood. Reality TV shows like Jersey Shore and The Real World influenced the story for the Infinity Island animation for LIME Cable Broadcasting, and celebrity internet cats, the writer’s gift that keeps on giving, were the basis for Señor Ticklewhiskers character in Learning.com’s Digital Citizenship app.  There are lots of other examples as well, but in every case, the choices we made were about setting the right tone and finding the hook to draw a specific audience into the experience. And maybe a little about what we learned on Buzzfeed that day. But only a little. 

Comment