GREAT TIMES!

Written by Vikky Cruz

The pressure of making everything perfect for an event seems a bit scary right? I got to experience this as one of the youth organizers for the 2012 Digital Waves Youth Media Festival. My nerves began to shake as it was time for the festival to start.

I helped the youth reps Bree Person, Danielle Motindabeka, and Tangeneka Taylor at the registration table. Groups of people began to come and my nerves began to calm because the youth reps were doing a good job giving out the materials. I was surprised by the amount of people that came to the festival.

The Youth MC’s Sayre Quevedo and Bryan Hamilton started the festival with their introduction and Sayre coming in surprising everyone, because he had made a Skype intro and everyone thought he was in California. That was an awesome beginning!!!

For our workshop, Grad Rookie and Producer Veralyn Williams and I presented a DIY video that teaches young people how to do interviews. This came out great!! It felt good to be the one teaching and showing the youth what I have learned in the past. The people that attended our workshop were very engaged in how to interview people out on the streets and wanted to learn how to become better at it. They were very interested in participating and asking questions. I was happy to be one of people to help them become better interviewers.

The lunch was great! Very healthy and delicious!

After lunch, I attended the Worlds Fair 2.0 + Newsgames: Interactive Storytelling in the Digital Age workshop. It was really amazing to see young people teaching the audience (which were youth as well) how to develop and create your own game through maps. The youth presenters said to get to the next level of the game we needed to travel to where ever the game was directing us to go. So instead of sitting on the couch all day playing this game, you need to get up and walk to the different places, which I thought was a great idea. I was so inspired by the uniqueness of the game, because it would be great for kids and teenagers to get up and engage with people in the outside world while playing videogames. I can’’t wait to create mine and have people travel all over NYC!

The multimedia slam competition was an awesome event but it starts out so you just get a tease of each story—one minute of a piece at a time. That frustrates me, but in a good way, because I want to listen to all of them, but I have to remember is a competition. Their was tension in the room because everyone had different opinions about the pieces. The judges were great and their scores were fair. Even though there were three winners in the competition, in my eyes everyone that participated was a winner, because they had their stories heard by total strangers and that’s brave.

The performers for the after party did an excellent job!!! When MC Bryan Hamilton performed he got youth rep Danielle and I so hyper that we went on stage and danced while he continued to perform. (This reminded me of a Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, and Lil Mama moment, where Lil Mama came on stage for no reason LOL). I thought that was cool and Graduate Rookie Josetta Adams sang beautifully and played guitar and was just amazing. It was a good way to end the festival.

Overall, the festival was exciting! I’m glad we had the youth teach each other. We need more of these events, so we can get the younger generation creating and building GREAT STORIES that we can hear at the next Digital Waves Youth Media Festival.

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