Nothing excites kids like a matinee. So grab a bag of popcorn, and listen to the story of three videos about Long Island Sound. These videos, made to be used in schools, were all created in response to teachers' pleas for audiovisual aids to help students learn more about Long Island Sound.
Every good film has its own niche, and each has a fascinating story of the people and ideas behind it. These films evolved separately, created by and for different audiences. Existing films about Long Island Sound were targeted towards adult audiences and tended to be too technical or dry for young audiences. After all, even if it's broadcast in prime time, an educational video or "infomercial" for kids has to compete with big names like Barney and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers - or Baywatch - for attention!
By: Peg Van Patten
Connecticut Sea Grant
The Living Sound
The Living Sound, created by Carey-Mac Productions, began as the concept of Dan Carey, who wanted to produce a professional film by and for kids. "There was nothing out there about Long Island Sound specifically aimed at kids. Schools didn't have a video," Carey says. He obtained start-up funds to create a half-hour special aimed at ages 8 to 13 from the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection's license plate fund. (This fund uses money raised from sales of designer license plates for research and education projects relating to Long Island Sound.)
Carey contacted Marlene Ibsen, who formerly worked at Hartford television station WTIC, Fox 61, and who had produced the station's Kids' News program. While Ibsen wrote a script using action and dialogue to appeal to older elementary school children, Carey continued raising funds from other sources. He described his venture to the Connecticut Sea Grant team with such enthusiasm that he was offered a technical advisor as well as modest financial support. Valerie Cournoyer, Connecticut Sea Grant's marine education coordinator and curator of education at The Maritime Center, became content advisor to the film and appears in its rocky shore segment.
"Interactive" is the byword in edu-tainment these days, so four teens were selected by teacher recommendation to become adventurous anchorpersons who investigate the Sound's ecology and learn about its problems. "Team LIS" consisted of Dan Meuse, Robert Young, Maiysha Ortiz, and Sandra Outeiro. These teens from different schools banded together to explore Long Island Sound and its shores by sailboat. Carey and Ibsen targeted the fifth grade as their average audience level, but the strategy was to involve both older and younger kids. Children in grades three to middle school would watch the film in school. "Younger kids like to look at older ones," Carey explains. "They'll zone out on adults, but they think that older kids are cool."
The most important thing is simply to tell a great story, Carey says. "Use lively graphics, original music, things you don't expect." And a great story it is. The team learns about the uses of the Sound, its wildlife, and how to keep it clean. They sail to New Haven Harbor, learning about estuaries, currents, food chains, and the users of the Sound.
At a Stonington marsh, Team LIS helps utility workers erect osprey nesting platforms. They band birds and learn about the decline - and return - of the fish hawks that have suffered from loss of habitat and DDT accumulation. Then they're off to Hammonassett to ride a lumbering low-impact amphibious vehicle over a salt marsh. Next, they walk on the rocky shore at Sherwood Park in Westport, where Maritime Center staffers Cournoyer and Holly Cuzzone show the team how a starfish moves on tube feet, what a sea urchin looks like, and how seaweeds can be used in jams, jellies, and toothpaste. "The most fun part was practicing our lines with the students over and over again as the tide came in and soaked our pants, shoes, and socks," Cournoyer says. High school teacher Joseph Treggor shows the team how to monitor and study plankton and report the results to a state agency. The students also learn about the importance of plankton to the food chain and the formation of harmful algal blooms.
During a visit to Mystic Marinelife Aquarium, the team learns about the Sound's native fish and its unusual tropical summer visitors, such as the graceful sea horse. At the aquarium's Seal Island they meet some of the Sound's winter visitors with whiskers and fins - the friendly harbor seals.
At each stop, there is an environmental message. There are 15 million people in Long Island Sound's watershed, the team learns as they stencil a "Don't Dump" message on storm drains. "What if everyone poured chemicals down storm drains and toilets at once?" Young asks. A lunchtime lesson teaches that if you don't properly dispose of the trash afterwards, the remains attract animals that can destroy fragile bird eggs. "In one way or another, we're all connected to the Sound," says Ortiz. "And no matter where you live, you can help."
"The most fun part was being in New Haven Harbor on the sailboat on a windy and cold day," says Meuse. "Long Island Sound is so much a part of our lives. I was surprised by the tropical fish that arrive in the summer." Meuse says his school, Norwich Free Academy, shows the video in marine biology classes.
The fact that the video would be used later in schools affected the way in which the action was presented. Animated action clips of waves and animals, a luminous lighthouse, and a bouncing beach ball mark transitions between scenes. "I especially like the purple sea urchin that scuttles across the cartoon benthos," says Cournoyer. "This video is valuable for kids because it holds their attention with snazzy graphics and video clips while imparting sophisticated and useful information."
Station WTIC broadcast the film, and Fox Kids' News used clips. An activity booklet, a word scramble, and an osprey flip book accompany the film, and the package is distributed at educators' conferences. While they could have simply done a video for school, Carey and Ibsen felt that airing their production for public broadcast would draw attention to efforts to preserve and protect the Sound. As it turned out, 30,000 households - some 80,000 viewers - tuned in. Carey was delighted that during the broadcast, ratings remained normal. It's more common for ratings to go way down during an educational kids' show, then pick up when a cartoon comes on.
Save Our Sound
"Save Our Sound", an original play by and for kids, is a low-budget, amateur-hour "once upon a time" story, but lots of fun. It was done as an after-school activity and was taped for broadcast on cable television. Its originators shared the philosophy that young kids think big kids are "cool." In this production, middle school youths wrote a play, created puppets, and performed the play for younger children.
The project had an unusual origin. It began as a collaboration among the Eugene O'Neill Theater in Waterford, Groton Youth and Family Services, Groton public schools, and Connecticut Sea Grant. Maggie Hardy, director of the O'Neill Theater's Creative Arts in Education program, and Nancy Lawrey, Groton Youth and Family Services program coordinator, were doing a program to keep Groton's public schools drug-free. They had done the basic drug education, but wanted to do something extra to keep students creatively occupied after school. They wanted kids to learn about their environment, and they had heard of Sea Grant's educational efforts during Coastweeks. Would Sea Grant help inner-city school children write and perform a play about Long Island Sound? You bet. Not your usual Sea Grant effort, but one in which small investments of time and money could pay big returns in the lifestyles of area youth and their families.
Hardy and Lawrey enlisted the help of Derron Wood, a theater producer who specializes in making life-size puppets, and Sea Grant staff for technical advice on things marine. Wood was the catalyst in a large spontaneous reaction. Students read about the Sound in newspapers and heard an introductory talk about the Sound, its inhabitants, and its problems. Then they wrote a play based on what they had heard, and constructed papier-mache puppets in the characters of their choice.
The advisory team expected the kids to come up with fish, birds, and other sea creatures. Indeed, one student insisted on making a giant red octopus. When an advisor said that octopuses really weren't common in the Sound, the student pulled from his pants pocket a tattered newspaper clipping about a rare baby octopus that was found in the Sound that summer, having traveled north on tropical currents. "See," he insisted, "there is one."
What the adults didn't expect was the kids' favorite creation - a special, practical, but flamboyant character with a sort of Bill the Cat expression and a slight overbite: Flushy, the witty talking toilet! Flushy is life-size, wears a festive blue rug over his lid, walks, and flaps his lid to talk about water conservation.
"Remember, kids," Flushy preached, "when you FLUSH and when you BRUSH (enter giant toothbrush and mouth: 'Up and down, up and down, side-side-side-side-side-side!') think about where the water goes. Be kind! Conserve water. And don't pollute. Long Island Sound is our environment, too."
Audience participation was the cornerstone of this production. As events transpired, the audience thought of ways they use water. They were cued to shout two refrains: "Yuk! That's gross!" and "F - f - l - lush!" - said with a flourish and a Chubby Checker twist movement. That's not all. The kids created enormous sea turtles that "eat" plastic bags. Plastic bags, the kids explained, look like jellyfish to the nearsighted turtles, who eat them and get sick. "Don't worry!" one character shouted. "I'm a sturgeon!"
The characters were created at two different Groton schools, Cutler and Groton middle schools, by separate student teams. Ideas and characters were shared, and a common script was developed. The play was performed for younger children at the schools, then at the Groton Public Library, where the play was filmed. After the play, young children sat down with coloring books made for them by the older youths, tried sea-craft activities, and ate sea-snacks. Soon scraps of colored paper and gobs of paste were flying.
The Storer Cable Television Company broadcast the play six times in 1993. The concept can serve as an idea for other schools to try, creating their own characters and script. Not only did the students use their imaginations, find out about environmental issues, and bolster their skills in writing, fine arts, and science, they also practiced teamwork and acquired self-esteem as role models for the younger kids.
Long Island Sound:
Worth Fighting For!!This video is a good example of another genre, the professional documentary produced for a general, adult audience but with a plan to use the finished product in secondary schools. Long Island Sound: Worth Fighting For!, a 30-minute documentary, was created in response to the same need for educational videos about Long Island Sound that generated the others. But this one was done as a full-fledged Sea Grant project, in conjunction with Connecticut Public Television (CPTV).
CPTV hired a writer and producer to work with their cameramen and a work team of Sea Grant and Extension advisors. The work team supplied educational materials on the Sound and lists of topics to be covered and people to interview. There are hundreds of organizations interested in the Sound, and the team wanted to be inclusive, featuring not only Sea Grant experts but also historians, environmentalists, and scientists from both Connecticut and New York.
The work team felt that the first step in getting the public to understand and care about the problems of Long Island Sound was to increase awareness of its cultural, historical, ecological, and economic value. The team then had to strike a balance between offering interesting historical footage and presenting the science and social issues of today.
After a gala premiere, the documentary was shown four times in 1993. The video was later mass-duplicated, and limited supplies are still available to educators. It was later nominated for two regional Emmy awards - one in public service and one for the lively nautical musical mix.
From the first, the project aimed to be interactive, like the videos previously described, but on a more sophisticated level. Rather than arbitrarily choosing the most pressing Long Island Sound issues themselves, the work team held a number of open public forums and roundtable discussions before listing the topics that people were most interested in, such as pollution, public access, and wetlands preservation and restoration.
While kids are not the "stars" of this show, it has elements of adventure to catch their fancy: pleasure boats of the rich and famous, summer romance, rum-running pirates, storms and tragedy, the life of a fishing family. Viewers see that the Sound has been, and still is, many things to many people, and that varied users do have an impact.
The work team prepared a supplementary activity booklet to accompany copies of the documentary ordered by educators. The free booklet, available to teachers upon request, outlines a classroom discussion on Long Island Sound public policy and management issues for students from middle to high school or even college level.
Viewers of all of these educational videos learn about hypoxia (low oxygen levels), a condition caused by excessive nutrients and the resulting algal blooms. Hypoxia has been identified as the most pressing environmental threat to Long Island Sound. In the first case, the problem is described by a high school teacher as Team LIS samples phytoplankton; in the second, through Flushy's flapping lid; and in the third, by a narrator and an animated graphic. In all cases, the message is tailored to the intended audience. In each case, the viewer, whatever age, learns that he or she does have both a connection to, and an impact upon, Long Island Sound. Moreover, viewers learn that they are not passive players in the drama that is the Sound, but are empowered to contribute to the continued health of the Sound and its denizens by personal choices made every day. Bravo! Bravo!
To order any of the videos in this article, visit the Marine Publications section of Connecticut Sea Grant.
Follow this link to learn about additional videos availble from the Northeast Sea Grant Programs.
Peg Van Patten is Communications Director for Connecticut Sea Grant.