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It’s been five six busy days since CineKid 2007 (the main event) concluded and only just now did I find some time to talk about the event.

Let me preface this entry by saying: CineKid was great. I have never worked with children before, mostly because I did not consider it a good fit, I disliked crying and nagging kids and all the other lovely things that are associated with the younger members of our society.

However, after two days of helping children, explaining “big-people-concepts” to them and simply putting a smile (well, smiles) on their face, I find myself rather enjoying the whole thing, how about that?

Thanks to some shuffling with Anna and Laura, the chief-volunteer-managers, I was able to spend most of my time in the Medialab, which is just a fancy name for a building chock full of interesting interactive installations and games.

Right at the entrance for example, was Eddie Enter, built by Daniel van Gils, a teacher of mine.

While Eddie and the free spaceship you could get from him was great, the single one installation that I liked the most was the Funky Forest, a piece d’art that taught children the most basic concept of nature: life requires sustenance.

Said concept, however, is rather abstract for a five year-old and coming up with an easy way of teaching it, in my eyes, is no small feat. Still, Theodora Watson and Emily Gobeille managed to come up with an easy to use and easy to understand solution, the above mentioned Funky Forest:

The whole experience is pretty straightforward: step one is to go stand in front of the screen for about 10 seconds, until a camera scans you. The shape of “your” tree will mimic the way you were standing at the time the tree was planted and, from what I could tell, the way you are built also affects the process.

Once you have a tree, you need to ensure that it is being supplied with enough water. There is a stream of water coming from one side of the field and the water interacts with many large objects on the ground. This makes it possible for the children to channel the water towards a certain tree, or even deprive the nature of any water at all.

In order to keep the whole experience educational, the Funky Forest provides the players with visual and aural feedback in the form of good / bad insects and happy / sad sounds. The better you treat your tree(s), the more happy-bugs there will be and the more beautiful your forest will look like, obviously.

The whole game is very responsive and is still capable of handling individual shapes (for the tree-creation) with as many as eight players on the field. The water itself can be controlled by up to twelve players and I am quite certain that it would scale up to twenty, if the field would have been bigger.

All in all, this was a great implementation of an abstract concept, done the right way. Children just kept coming back and some even grew so entangled (get it?) in the game that they had to be dragged away by their parents, to go watch a movie.

Funny trivia on the side: while the installation is actually geared toward a younger audience, we had a couple of 40+ year-old (children?) “plant” trees too and crawl across the floor to get some water to their trees. I guess that it’s true what they say: men stay children…

Apart from the Funky Forest, there were a couple of stop-motion set-ups that allowed children of all ages to experiment with stop-motion films. All these set-ups were manned by professional animators / illustrators, such as Marieke van Middelkoop, amongst others.

For older children, CineKid had greenscreens set up where you could record your own dance video, there was a mini-studio where interviews with Dutch VIPs could be conducted and the Waag Society even provided a few people that taught children the basics of a Foley stage

That said, there is way more to it than just the things I mentioned here and if you are interested, you can probably get a general idea by browsing through my gallery or reading the thoughts of another volunteer, Jolien Merks on her blog.

Also, thanks go out to Bas van der Linden for providing me with a few additional shots and there’s even more at his site.

It took them long enough to come around to my corner of the woods, but finally, they are here: Room Eleven, one of the better bands of this time is in concert tonight, in De Effenaar in Eindhoven.

From what I have heard, Room Eleven always has great shows and therefore I more than plan on enjoying every single minute of it; the fact that I am being accompanied by a lovely friend of mine is just additional icing on the (delicious) cake.

CineKid 2007, heralded as the biggest children’s festival across the globe, opened its doors last Sunday, October 14th, 2007 and has had a pretty eventful week so far - just about every national (and probably some international) newspapers have written articles about the whole happening.

This time around, the beautiful Westergasfabriek was chosen as the main even location, which probably is my favorite spot in all of Amsterdam and, apparently, also the favorite spot of many things Mediamatic, the company behind evens such as PICNIC’07 and, obviously, CineKid Festival.

If you have any children, or still feel young enough yourself to attend this kind of event, do not hesitate - the festival is only going for another two days, till Sunday, 21st of October 2007 and there’s a good chance that you will have a great time.

In fact, a huge team of volunteers, including myself, will be making sure that you have a great time at the 2007 edition of the CineKid festival, so see you there!

It is no secret that I love NRC.next, a newspaper that is aimed at people aged 25 to 35 with little to no sparetime. NRC.next is my main source of up-to-date information and provides me with the latest happenings in the world that I did not pick up through CNN.

One of the great things about NRC.next is that ever so often, there is some way to participate in the creation of the newspaper in one way or another; this time around, students from sister-college St. Joost Breda were offered a shot at getting their work published on the front page.

The guidelines were rather simple: students were tasked to come up with two pictures, one for the front page and one for the actual article.

The students had a mere week to find a solution and in the end, Sophie Verstappen, sophomore student of St. Joost, came through with an interesting picture that fit the overall theme of the article very well.

In more personal news: I have never been a photographer nor do I see myself ever becoming one, apart from the occasional snap I take just about everywhere I go, yet two of my pictures of this year’s Edu-Fair in Utrecht were used for a short article that gave a short account of the event.

… to all of those that congratulated me today. I have received comments via email, text messages, a very funny voice message and even a handshake from a train conductor - how about that?

The two items that stood out the most though, were the ones I did not expect at all:

Dorien Aerts, whom I met at the European Bloggers Conference last Thursday sent me this:

And Olga Gachko, from Spb, maker of fine Windows Mobile Software sent me:

Spb’s message was totally unexpected, yet a very kind gesture. It shows that the company is committed to keeping their customers ( = brand multipliers) happy and that is what counts in business.

To all the others that did not make the blog - thank you all, too!