Photography and Film Night

3rd Friday May 2013
Storyboard Activity 

For a Photography and Film Night, a storyboard seemed like a perfect activity. The idea came up in the brainstorm session with the community programs interns and staff. After this meeting, Haley and I decided to take over the storyboard activity and we came up with the following things to prep:

1- Two boards designed in the form of film roll, each holding six frames.

2- Old and new photos of downtown Santa Cruz and famous landmarks in Santa Cruz County for the location of the stories.

3- photos of a few historical figures from Santa Cruz (Rory Calhoun, Cora King Swain, Zasu Pitts, Axel Erlandson) along with a few cartoon characters to be used as the main characters in the stories (we thought it makes it fun to mix the real people with cartoon characters.)

4-Thought bubbles.

5-Some transition words to connect different scenes of the story.

The idea was to encourage small groups of visitors to use a number the prepared characters and locations and put together a story. After they finished putting their story together and left the station, we cleared the board for the next group of visitors. I used one of the boards to keep the samples on, so it would give the visitors some ideas about how this activity works.

By the end of the event, We had visitors of all ages participating in the storyboard activity. Of course, our young participants were so excited to play with their favorite cartoon characters like Miss Piggy and Wall-E.

Other visitors enjoyed the cowboy character of Rory Calhoun and the black and white photos of downtown Santa Cruz from the early 20^th century.

The life of Axel Erlandson and his Tree Circus inspired a group of teenagers to re-imagine Erlandson's life story.

And here is a love story created by a family of three:

A creative way of Evaluation

I just got an email from the wonderful Executive Director of MAH, Nina Simon and she kindly reminded me that the criteria for analyzing a participatory project is not just the number of people participating, but there are other factors that should be considered as well, which is so true.

Although at the beginning of each brainstorm session, we review our program goals, but some how in the process, I always get kind of stuck in the craft aspect of the project and forget about the more important part of the project, which is the potential for participatory outcomes.

From now on there is a major change of plan. In every step of designing an activity, I will go through the goals statement of the museum (MAH Event Philosophy page) and think a bout how we can contribute to these goals.

1. Meet Community Needs: meet the needs of our communities as defined by diverse constituencies within Santa Cruz County.

2. Build Social Capital: build social capital by strengthening community connections with our collaborators and visitors. This is a continual process of bonding within preexisting social groups and bridging between groups and individuals who might not usually interact.

3. Invite Active Participation: offer opportunities for visitors to have meaningful, hands-on, cultural experiences in which they act as contributors and co-creators, not just consumers.

4. Connect People to Creativity and Art: ignite active exploration of creativity and new artistic processes.

5. Connect People to Local History and Culture: deepen connections between visitors and the local history and culture of Santa Cruz County.

We have our weekly intern meeting tomorrow and I am going to share the idea with the other community program interns at MAH and think about creative ways to evaluate the outcomes of the projects based on our program goals.

I am already so excited to share this idea with other interns and hopefully we can come up with a creative way to evaluate our projects both in the process and after the event.