In 2005, the Smartest People in Media Tried to Predict the Future

About twenty years ago, a remarkable collection of educators, researchers, filmmakers, artists, technologists and policymakers gathered in San Jose to wrestle with a very large question:

What would it mean to be literate in the 21st century?

Adobe was involved. The George Lucas Educational Foundation was involved. The New Media Consortium was involved. There were people from universities, schools, media organizations, the arts and technology.

​A copy of their finding is here as a PDF.​

These were not people wondering whether computers might catch on. They were already looking beyond the computer.

They believed something much larger was happening.

For hundreds of years, literacy had primarily meant words. You read them. You wrote them. You understood them. But digital technology was beginning to loosen the monopoly of text.

Pictures were becoming easier to create. Video cameras were getting smaller. Editing software was moving onto ordinary computers. The Internet was making distribution possible without a television station, printing press or movie studio.

The participants believed that ordinary people were about to gain access to tools that, until very recently, had belonged primarily to professionals.

And if everybody was going to have these tools, then everybody would need to understand the language those tools spoke.

Images. Sound. Sequence. Editing. Framing. Movement. Emotion. Framing.

The report described 21st century literacy as an overlap of visual, aural and digital literacy, including the ability not simply to understand media, but to manipulate, transform and distribute it.

That was their big idea.

Media production would become ubiquitous, so media production would have to become basic literacy.

They were right. Spectacularly right.

They were also hilariously unprepared for just how right they were.

The film they didn't believe kids had made

I was working with a client who was headed to this summit. We decided to make a film with little kids. A group of them. 9 and 10 yrs.

How young could we go in teaching film making to kids, as a second language.

Before iPads. Before smartphones. Before a child could shoot, edit and publish a movie on something thinner than a Pop-Tart.

Our setup was considerably less glamorous. We rigged a MiniDV camcorder on a tripod. The camera was connected to a television with an SVA cable so the children could see the frame.

The other end of the MiniDV was connected to a laptop with stop-motion software that had just been written for the MacOS in 2005

We made a little film called Jack and Jill Fetch. The assignment? Re-imagine Jack and Jill any way they could brainstorm.

We taught them storyboarding. We showed them things like composition - long shots, medium shots and close ups. The rule of thirds. How editing was like the picture sequencing exercises they'd done since kindergarten.

There were adults in the room. I was one of them.

We guided them, hands off, to make a movie with their own spin and their own drawings.

Then the kids made the movie.

That distinction matters.

The kids did a great job.

It traveled to the 21st Century Literacy summit and was screened as an example of what elementary kids were capable of if media literacy was going to be a thing to be taught.

George Lucas' people were skeptical.

They didn't believe children that young had really made it. Surely adults had done the important parts. Perhaps the children had "helped".

Their skepticism was perfectly reasonable.

And completely wrong.

The kids had done it. They had understood the frame. They had understood where to put things. They had understood basic cinematography. They had understood simple editing. They had made the decisions.

They rather took to it like ducks to water.

Ten-year-olds.

There was a delicious irony we enjoyed when this was reported back to us. The brightest people in media education, gathered to argue that a generation of children would soon need to become fluent in the language of moving images.

Then somebody showed them kids already doing it.

And they couldn't quite believe it.

​Watch: Jack and Jill Fetch here. Then come back and read to the end.

That little episode has stuck with me for twenty plus years.

The irony nobody predicted

In 2005, the smartest people in media education were trying to imagine a world where everyone could make media. They had just toured Skywalker Ranch, the cathedral of professional filmmaking, then sat down to imagine that power spreading everywhere. They pictured flip phones, little digital cameras, laptops and blogs.

What arrived after a few years was a Skywalker Ranch in every pocket.

They got a lot right. Everyone became a publisher. Kids became fearless with devices. Media became interactive. Powerful tools became ordinary.

But they missed the darker side. “Digital natives” were not automatically media literate. Multitasking became distraction. Interactivity became the feed. Attention became the commodity.

And then came the thing nobody saw coming: the tools began making the media themselves.

That changes the question. In 2005 it was: How do we teach kids to make media when everyone has the tools?

In 2026 it is: Why teach kids to make media when the machine can make it for them?

Which brings us, strangely, back to scissors and Jack and Jill Fetch.

Hand drawn and cut out.

Move it. Shoot a frame fifteen time per second. Argue about the ending. Try again. Make the sound effect with your mouth. Laugh when the thing finally comes alive.

By modern standards, this is terribly inefficient. Almost like doing math with an abacus. That may be exactly why it matters.

AI can make the cleaner movie. But the crooked drawing, bad lighting, stray finger in frame and ridiculous idea only a nine-year-old would invent are evidence. Evidence that little humans thought, chose, failed, collaborated and made it.

Twenty years ago, Animating Kids looked like a way to prepare children for a digital future. The great irony is that its most old-fashioned ingredients may now be its most important: paper, pencils, scissors, three kids around a table.

In 2005, we were teaching kids how to put themselves into media. In 2026, we may be teaching them how to make sure there is still a human in there at all.

Human media is getting scarce. Let's relish the fact we can still teach kids the nuts and bolts of storytelling with their unique visions in this synthetic age.

Bon Animate!

The Team at Animating Kids

PS - We post our weekly digest of actual films made by kids below.

We post on Youtube every day, and we group the past seven films in a playlist accessible by:

​Week 4 Digest​
Watch last week’s batch in one playlist. 7 masterpieces of original hand-made content. About 7 minutes total.

​The Living Archive​
Browse the full YouTube playlist from the beginning as it grows. 28 films currently

animatingKids.com/livingarchive​​
Living Archive on a tiled video wall at animatingkids.com

Here's one click link to subscribe to our YouTube channel​ - be ready for a notification everyday for a new film. Usually one minute.