Q: What is Listen Up and what does it do in the ever expanding world of youth media?

A: Our mission at Listen Up! is to help youth be heard in the mass media,
contributing to a culture of free speech and social responsibility.
Listen Up! is a national Youth Media Network that helps youth
producers and their adult mentors exchange work, share ideas and learn
from one another. That is, we help youth filmmakers and youth media
practitioners connect the dots and have central place to get to know
each other. We do that in a lot of different ways: giving each of
the 150+ orgs in our network a web presence to showcase their work,
bringing everyone together in national workshops, providing all kinds
of information pertinent to the field (funding opps, festival
deadlines, news, etc.), production projects that get youth-made films
on TV and our online film festival the "Very Important Producers
Awards."

Q: What is the VIP Online Film Festival and how has it evolved over the past couple few years?

A: VIP is Listen Up!'s signature yearly event for youth filmmakers to
share their best stuff. A few years back we were one of the first
organizations to take advantage of the web 2.0 technologies and built
an open source architecture for a site that would enable youth and
their mentors to upload content to our site and manage for themselves
their web presence. However, "if you build it and they will come"
philosophy doesn't work in our media saturated world. At Listen Up!
we're always brainstorming ways to engage organizations to share work
and use the site. Naturally an online film festival seemed to be a
great way to engage our network to use the website. The VIP online
festival, now in its third year has close to 300 submissions from
about 60 organizations worldwide. It continues to grow year after
year.

Q: How have you seen the work of the young people evolve over the years that comes in through your submission process?

A: The VIP2008 competition is the best one yet -- the work continues to
improve. While we like to think that Listen Up! is at the heart of
the matter, we know that the growth is happening at the local
programmatic level. Many of today's mentors were the same young
people who came up through these same programs over the years. These
new mentors are young, talented and they're staying on and sharing
their knowledge with the new participants. That is, there's a
cumulative effect and there's now more expertise in the field than
ever before. That's why we're seeing a rise in overall production
value.

However, I don't want to downplay the role of Listen Up! as well. An
online exchange of work like our VIP competitions also fosters growth.
Youth filmmakers and adult mentors who were once working separately
from the larger community can now see more films than ever before.
When you watch someone else film can raise expectations and inspire
youth to raise production value, do better or at least inspire them to
get out of their comfort zone and try new things.

Q: Why an online film festival? What does that format offer that a traditional film festival may not?

A: Don't get us wrong, a traditional festival in real time is a beautiful
thing. Listen Up! is also a part of the coordinating committee for
the Urban Visionaries Film Festival held at the Paley Center for Media
(formerly the Museum of Television and Radio). It's a great venue to
bring artists and audiences together to watch great youth-made media.
There's a sense of excitement and emotion of being in a room with a
couple hundred people that you can't get by yourself in front of a
computer.

But the online venue gives us an immediacy and ease that can't be
beat. It's also makes screening work accessible to a much larger
audience. Last, the cost is nominal in comparison to a real-time
festival. In short, we can produce a festival with the call and
presentation in about six weeks. Just about anyone, anywhere with a
computer can jump in and participate -- you don't need to be in New
York City on a set date & time.

Q: Your audience is also your jury. Why did you decide to do that instead of use a "jury of experts"? How does the fact that its an online film festival help that work?

A: The online festival is participatory. We put every submission up and
put the audience to work to help determine what they like and think is
valuable. This year we'll have three $500 awards that are determined
by the audience. This actually helps build an audience because these
cash awards are not determined solely on the merits of the film...but
on the ability of filmmakers and their organizations to network.
They've got to work hard to get the word out to drive an audience to
see their film. For example, Spy Hop Production in Salt Lake City
shared their links to a mailing list of a few thousand people --
including the local major daily that published the links online and in
the paper itself. As you would imagine, the Spy Hop Production films
do well in our festival.

However, we also have a series of VIP2008 Awards that are selected by
Listen Up! staff as well as a few invited jurors. We want a balance
between building a fan base and celebrating really good that didn't
get that much attention because networking wasn't the strength of the
filmmaker.

Once selected, all of the best films and runner-ups are put onto a DVD
that we send out to film festivals worldwide -- furthering the reach
of youth-made media.

Q: Video is increasingly finding venues online. How do you think this will effect the field of youth media in the future?

A: When it comes to TV vs. the web for youth, the web wins out. Young
people don't even think in a linear "got to run to catch my show" way.
They catch things when they want on a bunch of different devices.
They're just doing their thing and not looking back. However, there
seems to be a balance that needs to be made. Listen Up! is also about
fostering responsible voices with clear ideas. We want youth to
participate in a national dialogue about who they are and what they
think about the world they live in. That still means working in the
realm of broadcast TV because most adults are still there. So we also
develop programs for TV, like our Peabody Award Winning "Beyond
Borders." We're now in production on "Beyond Green" which has youth
filmmakers creating short documentaries about the environmental crisis
around the world.