Welcome to an interview with an Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award finalist, Dantorie Reeves, age 16, from Mt. Pleasant High School, San Jose, California. Adobe Youth Voices aims to empower youth in underserved communities around the globe with real-world experiences and 21st century tools to communicate their ideas, exhibit their potential, and take action in their communities. You can vote until June 8.
1. What is your name and what is your Aspire Awards project? My name is Dantorie Reeves and I have two projects up for awards. One of the projects is a documentary called Martha's Soup Kitchen and the other one is an animation called The Ball Game.
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| Dantorie Reeves, Aspire Award project |
2. Please describe your project. What is it? What is the purpose? Well, [for Martha’s Soup Kitchen] my project was basically a couple of my classmates and I volunteering at a soup kitchen by serving drinks ,cleaning up, and also getting to know some of the clients. The purpose of my film was to open my community's eyes so that they can see that it doesn't take much to give back or help out our community or people that are less fortunate then us.
3. What do you hope that people will learn from your Aspire Awards project? What are your primary goals for the project?
I hope that people will learn that anybody can help other people. You don't have to be rich or even an adult because I'm not rich and I'm only a sixteen year old high school student. My primary goal is to get lots more people involved in the community and help get the hungry feed.
4. What do you hope people will learn from your project and ultimately do? I hope that people would ultimately just stop avoiding the homeless and hungry people and start trying to help them instead because even the littlest thing might help.
5. Describe the digital aspects of your project -- what kinds of video, audio, and graphics did you create? Where did you display them? Any social media sites? (Facebook, Google sites, Tumblr, Flickr, Orkut, blogs, your school's website, podcast sites, etc.?) On this film we used Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects to make the words in the background. After we finished the film I put it on Facebook, twitter, the school website. It is also on YouTube and our podcast on channel 28.
6. How will you use the Aspire experience to do more things? What are your next steps? This experience was really great so I am going to take this and hopefully make even better films. I loved seeing something that I made in a theater shown on a big screen [at the year-end event] and I really enjoyed watching films made by other students.
Free Resources for Community-Building / Youth Activities / Teacher Materials
Are you interested in activities that you can implement in your own community or school? Check out Good Deeds Society activities! They are available free and can be downloaded and shared.
E-Learning Success: From Courses to Careers -- 400-page e-book version totally free.
Printed library / personal copy version also available.
Kindle version here.
The Adventures of Tinguely Querer -- NEW reviews
