BAYCAT Teaches Bayview Students Media Skills

A typical teenager, Nick Quesada is smart and confident, loves playing basketball for the school team, and isn't all that keen on doing homework. Unlike your average teen, however, he's just been accepted to the media program at the prestigious San Francisco School of the Arts charter school, placing him on the fast track to a career in television.

But Quesada -- who lives in Bayview Hunters Point, a San Francisco neighborhood where the poverty rate is 22 percent and only 10 percent of students perform at or above grade level -- could be telling a different tale. Were it not for Bayview Hunters Point Center for Arts and Technology (BAYCAT), a nonprofit that's teaching life, job, and training skills to youth and adults in the area, his talents might have gone unrecognized.

"I would never have applied [to San Francisco School of the Arts] without BAYCAT," said Quesada. "I would never have even have known that I was good at speaking and the technical side of making films. It's really changed my mindset. I really want to become a filmmaker."

BAYCAT's 5,000-square-foot space in the American Industrial Center on Third Street is equipped with a wide selection of video and computer equipment. Although many projects rely on donated equipment, BAYCAT leases much of the computer hardware that the students use. This is so the organization will always have state-of-the-art equipment, according to Sonali Joshi, Development and Marketing Director at BAYCAT.

"Leasing means that we can stay up-to-date with the latest technology," she said. The idea, she explains, is to train students for internships and jobs working with the same digital video equipment they would use if they were working in a commercial video studio.

Although leasing machines may cost BAYCAT more, using newer computers provides students with a more realistic experience and, especially with a complex task like video editing, makes the process easier and quicker. That's not to say that the project is not looking for donations: up-to-date film, lighting, and camera equipment are all on the wish list (the organization doesn't accept donations of older, out-of-date equipment).

The project, according to Joshi, is also actively looking for donations of current video editing and Web design applications, such as Adobe After Effects, Macromedia Flash, and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

BAYCAT's Beginnings

The BAYCAT project was inspired by Bill Strickland's nonprofit Pittsburgh-based Manchester Bidwell Corporation, which offers after-school programs to at-risk public school students and vocational training for adults.

BAYCAT follows a similar model, and the organization has some ambitious plans: President and CEO Villy Wang hopes that the project will "make an impact on a larger scale, using Bayview Hunters Point as a model for what can happen both nationally and internationally for communities that are often seen as the ones that don't have anything good coming out of them. One of the goals in the early years is to build that infrastructure so we can scale it."

In the short term, students like Quesada learn how to produce TV shows in the My TV class. The class's final project is to create a 30-minute TV show called "Zoom In," which airs on Access San Francisco, San Francisco's public access station on cable channel 29. The students also make their videos available on Google Video .

In My TV, students learn how to conduct research, and how computer and video technology works. At present, the students use Apple's Final Cut Pro to edit videos -- the same software used by many professional video editors. Once students can grasp the technology, they produce video segments with the assistance of teachers like Will Hammond, Jr., who ran the class I attended. The students' enthusiasm is obvious: they all know about TV and are eager to learn how to produce their own shows. But this involves more than just making a video.

"My main goal has always been for [students] to understand the basics of team building, gaining social skills in terms of working together as a team," said Hammond. "Last semester, we not only had groups working on the show, we had departments. We had a creative department, a graphics department, and an editing department. Working in different teams, people got to see what their strengths and weaknesses were."

BAYCAT runs other classes, too, including a basic graphic design course. Both the TV and graphics classes focus on real-world projects. For instance, the graphic design students worked on the marketing materials for the local Alice Griffith Public Housing Project Opportunity Center, while TV students have also produced videos for the Mayor's Office of Community Development and the UCSF Center for Excellent in Women's Health. In addition, BAYCAT puts advanced students on real-life projects with small businesses in the area. In the long term, the organization sees this as being a significant part of its work -- matching skilled individuals from the community with businesses needing their expertise in marketing and other fields.

BAYCAT's annual budget is around $1 million; funding for the organization mainly comes from grants from bodies like the Skoll Community Fund (through a two-year, $400,000 grant) and United Way, and through other corporate donations. Companies like Hewlett-Packard have also funded individual projects.

BAYCAT's mission is "Educate. Empower. Employ," but the organization is about more than just teaching technical skills. "I like to say that we're creating the media makers of today," said Villy Wang. "We're talking about a TV show now, but what if there was a channel where there was good news about every neighborhood, where the news was not just about one person getting killed, but about ten people getting saved? Whatever it is, that's the kind of energy we want to build, and it's already starting to happen."

 

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©2009 Compumentor. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

BAYCAT instructor Neil Hamilton assists student Nick Quesada in editing the audio that goes with his video.

 

BAYCAT student and teacher

©2009 Compumentor. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

BAYCAT provides hands-on instruction; using Apple computers, the students write, shoot, and edit their own videos.

 

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©2009 Compumentor. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Students learn the meaning of technical terms that videographers use.