Today we’re excited to kick off audience voting for the Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) Aspire Awards, our annual competition inviting youth around the world to creatively express their vision for driving change in local communities.

Over the past 12 weeks, we’ve received more than 1,100 submissions from 51 countries – a record high! We’ve narrowed the field to 20 finalists in each of our content categories, including animation, documentary, music video, narrative, poetry, photography, collage, and collaboration.

Beginning today through June 8, finalist entries will be showcased on our Aspire Awards website. We encourage you – our community members and supporters – to get involved by helping to select our Audience Award winners. You can cast your vote by viewing, commenting on, sharing, “liking,” tweeting, and retweeting your favorite entries.

During the audience voting period, an international panel of professionals working in art, film, and other
creative fields will additionally select first- and second-place winners in each content category and a special category for this year – the UNICEF Challenge – which invites entrants to develop a youth-led project utilizing innovative digital tools and/or digital engagement to bring positive change to their communities.

Winners in our standard content categories are eligible to win software, hardware, and a charitable donation to a cause of their choice. In addition, the UNICEF Challenge winners will receive grants valued at up to $40,000(USD), dedicated to implementing the winning project proposals. Winners’ entries from all categories will be featured at distinguished exhibitions, including international film festivals and other arts organization events.

We’ll announce winners in all categories in mid-June and celebrate the winners and their achievements at the 2013 AYV Summit in August.

To learn more about our commitment to igniting creative confidence in youth, visit our Adobe Youth Voices website. And be sure to watch this space to keep up with what’s happening with the AYV Aspire Awards!

Adobe believes creativity not only makes the world a more beautiful place, but it is also a critical component to addressing some of the most difficult challenges we face as a society.

The global State of Create report Adobe released last year revealed only one in four people believe they’re living up to their own creative potential. In response, we’ve aimed to address this “creativity gap” by further imbedding creativity into our products, communities and schools.

Through Adobe Youth Voices (AYV), Adobe’s global philanthropic commitment, we’re working to ignite creative confidence in youth by empowering them to find their voice and make it heard. In doing so, we can help them become more active and engaged members of their communities and society at large. As an extension of this commitment, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of this year’s AYV Aspire Awards competition.

Now in its second year, AYV Aspire Awards is a global, online challenge that invites youth to creatively express their vision for driving positive change in local communities. Participants can convey their ideas using a variety of visual storytelling methods, from videos to photo essays. In addition, a new category for this year – the UNICEF Challenge – invites youth to develop a video proposal for a project they’d like to implement.

The Aspire Awards call for entries is now open, and we’re looking forward to kicking-off online voting for the public in late April.

Last year’s entries showcased remarkable talent. Below are a few of our favorites.

It’s an exciting time for us – please check out our AYV site for more info, and keep an eye out for more AYV-related announcements in the coming weeks.

Hoodforts dispels misconceptions about “hooded” youth in the Mile End area of London.

Cambio Jovenes explores how youth can shape the world around us.

Keep Pushing is about the importance of persistence in the face of hardship.

The field of youth media is about, among other things, pulling young people out of the audience and having them run the show. From passive to active, consumers to producers, bystanders to change agents. So, it’s an interesting dilemma to have – asking youth to put themselves back in the audience in order to define it.

Mike Cross, a Multimedia and Art teacher, put it this way: “How do you get a group of young people to define their audience for a media project when they struggle with the concept of audience?” He tackled this challenge head-on when he decided to do a poster project with his group of students.

As a way to introduce the concept of audience, he asked his students to make three posters – all with the same message, but for three different audiences. For this project, Mike defined the audiences for his group: elementary students, teenagers, and parents. Then he prompted his students to brainstorm and discuss all the ways that they could create their posters to target and appeal to the respective audience.

Following these discussions on audience and discerning which graphic design elements appeal to the different groups, students decided that for the elementary students they would use more playful fonts and have a lot of color; for the teens the posters would be more serious and have a cooler font–like a grunge; and for the parents the posters would be presented more formally.

In addition to defining these audiences, Mike had the students examine movie posters as a way to critique the graphic elements, as well as introduce how these different elements convey meaning to different audiences. They also discussed the process for creating a movie poster and used these as an example for their own posters.

“I learned that it is important to keep some guidelines but to balance that by allowing for creativity.”
- Mike Cross

In the end, students gravitated to creating social issues posters around the topics of gang violence, animal abuse, and the environment. The seriousness of these issues corresponds to the seriousness of purpose the students are bringing to their media work. When you’re encouraged to think carefully and to truly examine the interests and perspectives of the people you’re speaking to, it affects what you say and how you say it–and elevates the quality of your message.

When you find out what happens to plastics in your community, when you learn the hazards of plastic consumption – and the environmental harm – you have to spread the word.

This was the experience of educators and youth at Government Urdu High School, Tank Garden, an Adobe Youth Voices site. For their documentary film project on the Recycling of Plastics, they interviewed pollution control officials and doctors. They also visited recycling plants and learned the process in depth.

Beyond making the film, American India Foundation Coordinator Chandan Nallal reports that educators thought they “had to give the project a new dimension that would result in some effect at least on the immediate vicinity of their school.” They came up with the idea for a small rally, where students would hold signs and shout slogans about reducing, reusing, and recycling plastics.

When the head of the School Development Committee heard of the plan, he pressed for local leaders to join in the event. Ultimately, on a sunny day in late February 2012, an enormous crowd – including local town and education officials, students and teachers from Tank Garden and neighboring schools – assembled to lend their voices and support.

“The team circumambulated the school through the small streets and caught the eyes and ears of all residents, traders, and laborers!” says Chandan.

The event was a huge success, a moment of community pride that was gratifying to the students and educators involved in the project – and a thrill for local leaders. The students also brought their message home to their families. “Many parents of the youth participating in the project stopped using plastics because the youth insisted on it,” reports Chandan.

From parents, to school officials, to policymakers and other members of your community, you never know who will be willing to hear and take up your message… unless you speak to them!

Before anyone got into groups or picked topics for their Adobe Youth Voices project, this is what Deana Thai asked her students to do: “I really wanted them to want to work on the topic,” she said, “and not just be in the group because their friends were.”

A teacher at Lincoln High School in San Jose, California, she has in the past assigned students to groups and assigned topics. But with Adobe Youth Voices, she wanted it to be different. So she asked students to brainstorm individually then write down 5 topics or questions that they wanted to talk about and share with others.

To find out who else was interested in the same topics, students put their ideas up on the board. They brought up global warming, the importance of education, learning disabilities, and more. They wanted to talk about teen stress, teen depression, and the truth about health care. They’re concerned about body image, bullying, and drunk driving. Of the twenty to thirty different topics, they would focus on between eight and ten – to suit the size of the group.

““It worked out really well – everyone in the group was serious about the topic, because they cared about it,” said Deana.

Students subsequently formed groups based on common interests. In this way, most students joined with different peers than usual, and, Deana notes, the students who ended up with a friend “later told me that it was a mistake to try to assist their friend because they didn’t help with the project or even come to class.” She reflects, “they didn’t know where to draw the line” with a friend who was not participating.

Identifying what’s important to the students “was important for the success of the groups and projects,” Deana says. Moreover, she asserts that the educator needs to be enthusiastic in order to get student buy-in: “You can have all the tools you need, but if you don’t care for the topic or what you’re teaching, students will pick up on it.”

Whether an educator or youth, the common denominator in this formula for success is caring about what you do.

Deana Thai is a teacher at Lincoln High School in San Jose, California. As part of Adobe Youth Voices, she teaches an elective Digital Multimedia class for 11th and 12th grade students.

To view an animation entitled “Anorexia” by Lincoln High School student Ryanne Zertuche, visit our Youth Media Gallery.

Having a creative vision isn’t just for Hollywood directors, but for anyone who sets out to make media that will matter to its audience.

To produce something that communicates your message in a compelling way takes forethought. This advance planning and design is how a trio of Adobe Youth Voices students – including Samry, a participant at the Fitzroy Learning Network Computer Clubhouse – focused their thinking for a new media project.

“Hopefully, the video will teach people to be understanding,” says Samry.

“My current project is going to be a combination of video and animation about refugees,” says Samry. She is working with two other people, and notes, “We are all refugees from different backgrounds.” They have a vision for their work: “Hopefully the video will teach people to be understanding and accepting of refugees that come to Australia.”

To this end, they have had to make a lot of choices in the course of the pre-production and production process. There are of course myriad ways to represent the issue, in any number of media formats.

Talking it through together, Samry says that they decided “part of our filming will be a conversation between the three of us about the hardest thing about being a refugee, and our experiences.” She explains it was a deliberate choice to do this “instead of interviewing because we wanted to show a personal experience rather than just talking about ourselves to the camera.”

Thinking about how they wanted their media work to resonate with the audience gave them direction at the outset of the process. They came up with their vision and worked backward from that to craft something that would help them carry out that vision.

Their design choices are key in this process, and Samry notes, “We hope to use animation to make statistics and stuff more interesting.” Being open to mixing media forms gives their project more creative potential. Being open, in general, to the wide array of media formats and tools – and to all the different things that are possible with storytelling, imagery, and sound, etc. – can help media artists realize their vision.

This has been true for Samry and her peers, who find that sometimes, during production, “We try something and if it doesn’t work with the project we will talk about changing it.” They are open to adapting their plans as they work, but the vision had to come first.

Her media project was due in just a few days, and the high school senior couldn’t focus. “I originally started with a completely different subject,” says Nicole, an AYV alum, “and while planning out that script, my aunt passed away.” It became clear to her that she needed to do the media project on her aunt – in her memory.

“I wasn’t quite sure how to do it,” Nicole reflects, “until I read a poem that my cousin had written in honor of my aunt. I wanted to have something just as inspiring.” So she set to work, intending to produce inspiring footage to pair with the poem she wrote. At the same time, she didn’t want the imagery to overwhelm her words.

Like all media makers, she was faced with a number of artistic choices. The ways that she negotiated them could detract from or lend even more power to her finished work. Nicole decided to minimize movement and sound, refrain from elaborate transitions, and use images directly related to the text of her poem. She shot the video to reflect her point of view, focusing in on her actions. All of these choices were very deliberate. By these means, she got the viewer to connect with her as the subject of the media work. She compels the audience to take her perspective in All I’m Left With.

“I started off showing myself getting ready to write, then writing out the first line of the poem,” and, she explains, “from there I switched back and forth between what I was doing and what I was thinking.” Some images, like the sunset and garden, directly illustrate her poem. Other shots capture what she says is her typical behavior, such as “holding my cross while I think, looking at photos.” These unguarded moments invite the audience in, perhaps even more so than if she talked directly to the camera.

Many other choices had to be made in the course of production. Nicole reports that she took simple shots first, without sound, then “added in any opacity changes, transitions, and sound effects later.” Still, she endeavored to retain a kind of simplicity in the film. “I used to think that more effects made the video more interesting,” she says, “but I guess ‘less is more’ was more the case in this situation.”

Having “less” ornamentation dignifies her subject, and brings the audience closer. These artistic choices not only shaped her piece, but also were part of a creative process that helped Nicole “sort things out for myself.” In the end, both media maker and consumer share the power of the experience.

Especially with the support of seasoned educators, youth media producers grow and expand their acumen. Youth media isn’t about the absence of adult input, but rather strong behind-the-scenes presence of a facilitator, who empowers youth to make their own artistic choices.

This philosophy drives the work of people like Peter Pheap, an Adobe Youth Voices trainer, educator, and mentor, who facilitates media making at Boys and Girls Clubs in northern California. Peter took a break from his regular gig to lead a one-day workshop at the Adobe Youth Voices Summit 2009. His task was to guide an international group of youth in making a music video. Given the time constraints, good facilitation would be key.

He came prepared – “I brought a few beats with me that some of the youths from my clubhouse made, to see which ones might work best.”

And, as much as possible, he built in opportunities for the youth to make different choices and take ownership of the piece. “I left it up to the teens to come up with their style – whether that is singing, rapping, or spoken words – because I knew that if they couldn’t sing or rap they could at least talk into a mic and read their poem over some music.”

By setting the project up this way, he notes, “the youths felt really comfortable knowing that if they weren’t musically inclined they could still participate.”

“I formed three groups and made sure they took turns videotaping while switching roles so they each had a chance to be the director, cameraman, audio, and talent,” Peter goes on to explain.

To supply a common frame of reference and orient them to the project, Peter showed the students a couple music videos in the styles that his groups have done in the past. He explained the steps of the production process and talked about basic song structure. To “help me facilitate and coach some of the other teens on song structure and writing lyrics,” Peter brought along a young person from his program who he’s worked with many times.

Providing adequate support and advising on the scope of a project are important functions of a facilitator. Given only one day to complete the piece, Peter had to structure the work so that the tasks were achievable, while still very much a youth production. He recalls, “I decided to go with a slower instrumental; it would be easier for the youths who never wrote a song before to catch on and sing or rap to the beat. If I had more time, we probably would have been able to compose and produce the beat during the sessions.”

Also as part of the pre-planning, Peter came up with the topic of “identity” for the music video, which he figured would be accessible but open-ended – and provide the structure they needed to move quickly through the production steps. Each person contributed lyrics for 4 measures, or 8 if they liked.

Individuals in the group had the opportunity to express themselves not only through their lyrics, but also in how they appeared on screen. “I made sure they taped themselves multiple times,” explains Peter, “using the different types of shots that I was asking for, such as close-up, medium shots, long shots, and b-roll.” As facilitator, he endeavored to give them a range of opportunities to shape the final media work. He adds, “once they had their own footage, they were able to edit their part of the music video, and I just pieced them all together.”

When young people have the responsibility to edit their parts, to make choices about their work, it enhances their sense of ownership – and investment in the project. Whether it’s a collaborative music video created in one day (i.e., “Identity”), or a media work months in the making (i.e., “I Am the Difference”), facilitation makes a difference.

Where to go for a project idea? One that grabs you, and that you want to share with others? Amer, an Adobe Youth Voices artist from Amman, Jordan, says to look around you – and “follow your interest.”

“I get an idea from something that inspires me in my everyday life,” says Amer.

Coming up with an idea can be the hardest part of a media project. When it’s a good idea, often the work just flows. A good subject is motivating and open-ended. It should originate with – and be shaped by – the media artist. And, there’s no telling where a good idea might come from. For example, Amer takes his inspiration “from the news” or “sometimes I see something, or a problem in my community.” He keeps his eyes wide open to the possibilities because he wants “to make a difference in the world.”

Taking a moment to reflect, Amer says, “I remember one of my very first projects which really moved me to get up and work – and do something to express what I felt.”

“One evening a couple of years ago, I was watching news on TV, and they were talking about murders and arrests in Palestine where the other half of my family lives, while in our neighborhood not far from my house, there was a big wedding where music was loud and people dancing and singing happily, and it made me think how life can be really complicated, how some people suffer while other people don’t care – or maybe they just had to move on,” explains Amer.

The contrast really struck Amer at the time. He “wanted all people to be happy and dancing, not to suffer.” This well of feeling prompted him to create “No War,” a short video that depicted “the contradiction in our life” by interspersing music clips and news of war. It was his effort to evoke the same kind of emotional response in his audience that he had originally.

Sharing what inspires you is at the heart of youth media. It can be shooting video on your own, like Amer did to make “No War.” Or, it might be composing music, like Arabic rap, with a crew of friends – which is how he likes to express himself these days. Either way, Amer takes inspiration from his life and the lives of people in his community. Then he turns it into media that reveals something about the world, and carries his message.

October marks the second month of Adobe Youth Voices’ partnership with Eastside Educational Trust. Last month, Miguel Salinas and I traveled to London to welcome the new organization into the AYV family, and make plans for training, outreach, and the 2012-13 program calendar.

Adobe Youth Voices chose Eastside Educational Trust as our newest partner because they have a proven track record in youth media, and are well connected in the arts education field in London. They are uniquely located in the “Silicon Valley” of London, Shoreditch, a working class turned hip/artist/industrial neighborhood with many start-up design and technology firms.

Eastside’s charge is to increase the participation in the next year by 20 educators (for a total of 35), strengthen external connections to the program, support innovative and outstanding teaching practices, host several super creative exhibitions of youth work, and to engage a very eager office of Adobe volunteers. If Rakhee Jasani, Executive Director of Eastside Educational Trust, looks a little and tired in the above photo, it’s because her to do list had turned into a book by the end of the week!

London is an exciting city for Adobe Youth Voices because of the thriving creative field, the many NGO’s and culture of social entrepreneurship, the thousands of talented youth, tech savvy educators, and a community-oriented Adobe office. For the past two years, AYV’s London partners have produced groundbreaking youth media, including Deaf Not Dumb in 2011 and Hoodforts in 2012. We are expecting even more great projects and impact in the year to come!