The Zine Gift Economy - Visual Art Lesson

The Center for Community Arts in Walnut Creek teaches art to its community. When people couldn't get to the classroom, the Center needed a way to bring the classes to them, so they set out to produce art lessons that fourth and fifth graders could follow at home, on their own, with no teacher in the room.

They brought in Gorilla Creative, a video production company in the San Francisco Bay Area, to produce four of them. This is The Zine Gift Economy, taught by teaching artist Elaine Ponce, who walks students through making a zine by hand and the tradition behind giving them away rather than selling them.

The Challenge

Fifteen minutes is a long time to hold a ten year old, and there's no teacher standing there to bring them back. A student watching at home had to be able to follow along and finish an actual zine, not sit through someone else making one.

The production side had its own math. Four complete lessons, one classroom, one day. That's over an hour of finished instruction out of a single shoot, with teaching artists who are excellent in a room full of kids but don't have experience in front of a camera.

Our Approach

One camera stayed on Elaine speaking straight into the lens, so a student watching is being talked to directly. The second looked down at the table from overhead, on her hands and the paper, at the same angle a student's own hands are in while they work. A zine is folds and cuts and small marks, and none of that reads from across a room.

Our director coached each teaching artist through the process, helping them feel comfortable and confident.

In post production we cut between the two angles so the lesson never loses sight of the hands, then finished with color grading and sound mixing.

The Outcome

An instructional video is judged by whether the student watching can finish the project. That's a different bar than most video has to clear, and clarity is most of what clears it.

The Center for Community Arts came away with four complete lessons out of one day in a classroom, and a way to keep teaching when people couldn't get to the building. We designed the coverage around the hands, directed the teaching artists through it, and cut all four so the instruction stays in front of the viewer from the first fold to the finished zine.