A few months back I commissioned up-and-coming filmmakers Neil Losin and Nate Dappen of Day’s Edge Productions to develop an engaging, promotional video for Backyard Naturalists. BYN is a children’s education program whose mission is to inspire a lifelong appreciation of the natural world in children through educational programming that integrates science, art, and technology. This program, which I co-founded in early 2012 with Sonya Carpenter from the Highlands Biological Foundation, is a spin-off of Meet Your Neighbours.
Right from the beginning, I knew that this video needed to be different than the traditional science pitch for children. In addition, both Sonya and I agreed that it needed to contain some useful information that would allow viewers to immediately go out and discover something. Nature is all around us and there is no point speaking only about plants and animals in a far away location to a generation that rarely goes outside anymore. As Robert Michael Pyle writes, “What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?” While the three tips featured in this short film might be obvious to you and I, to many children nature can be quite daunting and in particular when they’ve never experienced it first-hand.
Finally, I believe that it is important to feature presenters whom kids can relate to or can to look up to. As Niall and I discussed in a recent conversation, there are too many presentations for children featuring scientists with beards looking down over reading-glasses. If we’re ever going to reach kids for nature, at the very least we’re going to have to meet them halfway. I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on this video, both good and bad. This is a learning process for me as well! Thanks for watching
Hello Clay
I think this is exactly the sort of comms. material we need now. Not a dry brochure, or earnest words from an “expert” but a pacy video of hip young people enjoying looking at nature. I like the videography – there’s not a moment when the audience could start to lose interest. Why are more photographers not producing this sort of material?
My best
Niall
Clay
I echo Niall’s comment All in all it speaks well but I do have one small problem with it, The stone lifting & moving fallen timber can be destructive to those’s that live under or in them, the reason I mention this is becourse we are trying to deal with a similar problem of firewood collection in the arid zone which leads to micro habitat destuction but the real interesting thing is that even disturbing micro habitat can have negative impact as well & yes this is a different environment to the one in the clip but its something worth thinking about .
Kim
Hi Niall,
I’m glad that you enjoyed it! It is all fine and good if I like it but if it doesn’t work for others then what’s the point?
Hi Kim,
As always, thanks for weighing in. While I agree that lifting a log can cause disruption to creatures living beneath it, I would say that this type of behavior or interaction occurs with or without humans in the picture. Bears flips massive logs, raccoons and foxes dig, our primate ancestors certainly do the same types of things as well. I guess my point is that humans, for better or for worse, are just as much of a part of nature as any other creature and as such have an equal right to explore. Kids (including this one) want to flip rocks and see what lives beneath and I don’t think that this is bad as long as it is done in a careful manner. There is nothing quite as exciting as lifting up a a stone and discovering an ant colony or some fantastic beetle. It is a bit like magic!
In all fairness, I am familiar with the firewood issue there in Australia and recognize that it leads to different types of concerns but restricting children from really exploring like this seems to have the potential of pushing them away from nature rather than to it. However, most kids have so many rules that they have to deal with. In many neighborhoods, they aren’t allowed to climb trees, or build forts or do much of anything. I guess what I’m getting at (sorry for the rant) is that I don’t believe that long term harm comes from careful exploration.
Thanks!
Clay