Recess! Media

With the arrival of less expensive digital cameras and the editing programs that are becoming part of the software bundles for many computers these days, you may well have a budding Stephen or Stephanie Spielberg in your family. And once they have started thinking about their first ” indie” film, they may just want to check out several websites that may help spur them on.

One place to begin is with, noodlehead.com, from Burlington, Vermont — a commercial site that’s concerned with helping young people to create, produce and market their own original videos, which are offered for sale through the site. The videos range from “How to Make Your Own Great Videos With Just a Camcorder, ” to “How to Deal with the ‘Jerks’ in Your Life,” to video essays about Race and racism in America — all created by and for an audience of young people. There’s also a very helpful free section devoted to some basic production advice which reads like a series of cautionary fables. The moral of the first one is: “It will always take longer than you thought.”

And when your resident auteurs are ready for the leap to hyperspace, they should look at the programs for Gen-Y filmmakers being offered through Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in Utah. There’s even a summer film camp, with a limited enrollment, for high school students from the Salt Lake City area. But if school districts in other parts of the country are interested in duplicating some of these programs — like the one that works with young people “to explore their unique life story and individual point of view”– Sundance will help make those materials available to them. The mission of Sundance is to encourage “independent, creative thinking” — an idea that is even emphasized in a game that is offered through the site, called “The Imaginasium.” And that’s just the point: to exercise any talents takes some vigorous stretching.