Teen Media Awards

On Wednesday, August 14, 2013, Library staff and community members gathered to honor the creative works of Pittsburgh teens at the 3rd annual Teen Media Awards! Winners of the Ralph Munn Creative Writing Contest and TheLabs “Labsy” Awards shared their writing and creative arts with a packed theater!

Teen Media Awards 2013 @ Carnegie Museum of Art Theater

Keynote speaker Shioban Vivian started off the evening with an inspiring (and comical) talk about following your dreams and always striving to be creative and hard working. See below for winners and photos from this very special night in Pittsburgh!

Keynote Speaker: Siobhan Vivian

Ralph Munn Creative Writing Contest

Poetry
1st Place: “A or a” by Rose Swanson
2nd Place: “Hospitalia” by Agatha Monasterios – Ramirez

Short Prose
1st Place: “Bishop and Wash” by Lana Meyer
2nd Place: “Veteran Advice” by Kristen Grom

Screen Writing
1st Place: “cHaos before hArmony” by Justen Turner-Thorne
2nd Place: “On the End of Every Fork” by Tyler Hudson

Labsy Awards

Photography
1st Place: “Tanzania” by Olivia Muse
Honorable Mentions: “Flagpole” by Morgan Wable-Keene, “Downtown” by Raven

Design
1st Place: “Chronology Poster” by Morgan Wable-Keene
Honorable Mentions: “Submission 2” by Sarah Watkins, “Drawing 1” by Lexi Hall

Music/Audio
1st Place: “Short Jam” by David Watkins
Honorable Mentions: “Midas Theme” by Morgan Wable-Keene

Maker’s Studio
1st Place: “Space Intruder” by Morgan Wable-Keene
Honorable Mentions: “Speaker” by Ceu Gomez Faulk, “Glam-o-Tron” by Joshalyn and Cassidy

Video
1st Place: “Hat Chasers” by Simone Traub, Julian Edwards, Ashae Shaw, Umoja Shaw, Trayvon Ramsey, Jayla Ramsey, and Caliyha Hogan
Honorable Mentions: “Midas” by Cody, Morgan, Sarah, Philppa, Pascal, Kayla, and Pei Pei, “Electric Twist” by Kate Philipps, Hannah Philipps, Tessa Twyman, and Mae Twyman

For more photos from the Teen Media Awards click here or here or here.

The 2014 Teen Media Awards are just around the corner. If you are a budding writer, photographer, filmmaker, designer, creative-extraordinaire in Pittsburgh or Allegheny County, get started on your work today!

Looks for details on the Ralph Munn Creative Writing Contest in spring 2014 and visit The Labs at Main, East Liberty, Southside, and Allegheny to start working on your designs, photography, and more!

QuickFLIX: Are You The Next Great Film Director?

Are you an aspiring filmmaker? Perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way, but you like to shoot goofy videos with your camera phone. Well, whether your an iPhone auteur or a budding Bergman, you only have have four more days to submit a movie to the QuickFLIX filmmaking contest–CLP-Teen Services one and only movie competition.

As we wrap up the second year of free QuickFLIX filmmaking workshops (all led by talented Pittsburgh Filmmakers artist, Sarah), I’d like to urge all of our readers to step up and submit a video. Don’t be shy–all you have to do is send us a movie (3 minutes or less) to teens@carnegielibrary.org. (You can also upload to YouTube and send us a link, or use a free file sharing site like sendspace if the file is too large.)

What could you win? I’m glad you asked:

Grand Prize: $100 iTunes gift card
2nd Prize: $50 iTunes gift card
3rd Prize: $25 iTunes gift card

You have until Friday at midnight to submit your movie. Need inspiration or want to see what you’re up against? Check out this year’s submissions on the CLP-Teens YouTube channel:

For more details on the contest (rules, how to submit, etc.), click HERE.

Happy movie-making!

– Corey, Digital Learning Librarian

Have an animated Thanksgiving!

If you’re anything like me, you might crave some alone time away from the family this Thanksgiving holiday (or you may just want to skip out on helping with the dishes).  Here are some fun ways to occupy your time, allowing you to create your own animations, on your computer or smart phone.

Scratch

Scratch is a programming language developed by MIT “that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.”  It’s free to join and share things.  Once you create a Scratch project, people can interact with it or download and remix it.  For example, someone has made a calculator using Scratch!  You can also make games to play – there’s a gallery here.  And if you get stuck, there’s a Support page and Forums.

Flipnote

Unfortunately, this is only available as a Nintendo DSi program, but you can also browse and watch the Flipnotes that others have created using their DSi.  Since the program is available worldwide, there are many international Flipnotes, and it could be a fun way to practice your Japanese!

Still from a stopmotion animation creation by flickr user Regev Tovim

For those of you who took our Quick Flix workshops, taught by awesome people from Pittsburgh Filmmakers, I have some free Stopmotion and other animation programs!  These require some downloads and tutorials, but could take your filmmaking to the next level.

Animate Clay

This has how-to videos, a newsletter, video interviews with animators and free motion capture software for download. It was created by animator Mark Spess, who taught himself to do stop-motion and thought there should be a place online for fellow animators to learn and share their craft.

Clay Animator

This software is based on the Anasazi software from the Animate Clay website, and can work with a built in PC camera or digital camera connected to your PC.

Synfig

This is free 2-D animation software, “designed as powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create animation frame-by frame, allowing you to produce 2D animation of a higher quality with fewer people and resources.”

Pencil

Unlike many of these programs, Pencil works with Macs as well as PCs, and can be used for traditional hand-drawn animation.  Here’s an example of something made with Pencil:

Blender

Blender can do 3-D rendering and is free and open source for all operating systems.  The effects in this movie were made using Blender:

Before you start out on your journey, you can always use your local library to do some basic research on making animation!

– Tessa, CLP – East Liberty

Filmmakers at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Filmmakers classes

Check out http://pittsburgharts.org/medialab/ (for teens and adults) for classes held at the Media Arts Lab.

About the Annie Seamans Media Arts Lab:

It is a state-of-the-art media production facility dedicated to the promotion of Media Literacy. The Lab is located in the Scaife Building at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

1047 Shady Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15232
412-361-0455 x326

and http://www.pghfilmmakers.org/education/classschedules.html (for ages 17+) for classes held at Pittsburgh Filmmakers

Do something new this summer!

G Moulton @ CLP-East Liberty