Carrick and I got such a positive response from making 'A Kid, a Car, and an Idea' that we decided to make another video. Give the people what they want! 'A Message for Grownups' is like a sequel to our first video, but it covers a broader range of issues done in the same kind of style.
Actually, 'A Message for Grownups' is the 2nd in a series of 3 videos that I thought of doing with Carrick – my plan was to make the 3 videos and leave it at that. Even the best laid plans… As I write this we have 7 videos done and 4 more being edited, with plans for several more in the next few months, and we haven't even done the 3rd of the originally planned 3. As long as Carrick still wants to make green videos, there is more yet to come.
I worried about the opinionated aspect of this video. I didn't give it much thought in our first video, which was mostly showing how the veggie car thing worked and imagining the larger possibilities – not really a lot of opinion there. The tone of this video was different though, and I was very much aware of how much of that to show this time.
There was another kid video on YouTube that helped me keep the opinions in perspective. This video features a girl about Carrick's age giving her take on politics, government, conspiracies, etc. Now, I know 8-year-olds are opinionated, but it's obvious to anyone watching that this stuff isn't coming from an 8-year-old; somebody else is telling her what to say. Bill O'Reilly picked up on it (she disses Bill too) and suggests child abuse, exploitation of the girl, etc.
People who disagree with the message of our video probably would lump us into the same category as the little girl's video, but I drew some big distinctions. Carrick is into this stuff – he's an eco-kid. You could just point to the influence of his parents, but it's no different than, say, all the kids who see their (usually) dads watch the game on TV and really get into learning all the players and teams, collecting cards, etc. I get into this subject at length in the post 'Carrick's Dad, Child Abuser'.
Probably the strangest experience we had making this video was the scene with all the cows. There is a dairy farm a few miles away from our house and there are always a bunch of cows standing around in the field, so I thought this would be a perfect location for our 'Eat Less Meat & Dairy' section. We walked up and met the farmer and asked permission to shoot some video with the cows: mind you, the point of this is the message to eat less meat and dairy, which, needless to say, we didn't tell the farmer. I planned on getting some shots of the cows, and to have Carrick do his lines standing there with all the cows. It was feeding time for the 50 cows and I had a great setup with Carrick sitting on the edge of the trough. Unfortunately for us, in with the 50 female cows was a bull who didn't really like people coming near his ladies. He wandered over to size things up and the farmer wisely moved us over to the fence. With the bull still keeping a close eye on us, the farmer stayed with us and I made an on-site decision to do this whole section as a voiceover.
The farmer told us an interesting thing about pesticides. Right down the street is a farm that uses pesticides – you can see all of the spray equipment out front. Anyway, he used to buy sweet corn from the farm stand and give it to his cows as a treat (they loooooved it) but a few days later pesticide residue showed up in the milk and the company who bought his milk refused the batch, which he had to dump. So the pesticide in the milk is considered unsafe, yet people buy bags of the corn from the farm stand to eat and that's OK. I'm all for supporting local farms, but I'll skip the chemicals thank you, no matter what the government allows as "safe levels".
Another interesting thing the farmer told us is that the string of wires that make up the electric fence only deliver a very minor shock, and the cows could easily break through if they wanted to. He said that a few times they got spooked and trampled the fence to get out. I thought it was funny that the only thing trapping these huge animals was their fear of this thin harmless wire.
The scene with all the disapproving kids was funny. I asked the people at our UU church if I could use the kids in a video, so I lined them all up and walked down the row. I told them that I needed them to look disappointed, like what your Mom or Dad looks like when you did something you shouldn't have. Some of the kids couldn't keep a straight face, while others had some great expressions and gestures. Getting all the kids to stay in place and cooperate was going to be next to impossible for me, so I kept it quick and made the best of what I got.
I had a hard time coming up with a visual for the electric car section. The only real electric cars I knew about were mostly in museums (thanks for that, GM). At a customer's house one day, I saw their little boy playing with a remote-control little yellow Beetle, and I knew I had found my prop. I bought one, added the smiley face, and got shots of Carrick driving it around our yellow Beetle, sort of a bridge from the first video.
Sometimes it takes a lot of 'takes' to get it right, which you don't get from watching the finished video. Making our first video out in the cold didn't help, and those multiple takes weren't very fun for Carrick. This time we shot at the playground over several days, and we took a lot of play breaks. That worked a lot better!
Once I edited the footage together, the whole thing struck me as having too much finger-wagging, too serious. What you didn't see is all the cracking up and joking before and after the takes. What we needed was some humor to lighten it up. Adding the Herbie theme song seemed like a good fit, although I was wary of adding copyrighted material. The cow fart sound effect was my boy sense of humor coming out. My kids still crack up every time they see that part.
One thing that I really tried to consciously add to this video was the idea that although Carrick is making these videos about serious issues, he's a regular kid too. He's not eccentric and doesn't spend his time obsessing about global warming while all the other kids are outside playing. He likes to do all the usual kid stuff too. I guess it's mainly a little defensiveness on my part so I don't get accused of keeping Carrick in a cave and turning him into a little climate change zombie/soldier.
We didn't make this video for a contest and we didn't have any time limit. The imposed time limit of our first video made it better in the end. I did my best this time to avoid the unessential shots and tried not let it get too bloated. Still, I started reaching the limits of what my poor computer was capable of processing, so there was still a limiting factor.
Some technical improvements helped make this video a little more polished than our first. I upgraded to a lavolier microphone, which really helped the audio quality. I learned how to use a multi-track sound editor to do the voiceovers, music, and sound effects. I paid more attention to how people frame their shots to make it more visually interesting. Still, I hope that people will find a charm in the totally amateur quality of the videos and not say "that sucks".
'A Message for Grownups' was a fun project to work on – we got to work on some interesting ways to put across messages and make it visually interesting, too.