Last month Muse Video and student interns from MetWest High School in Oakland, Ca, released an animated video project The Wake Up Call: Time to ACT on Climate Change.

The students were inspired by the ACE presentation and wanted to do something similar to talk to their peers and even middle school students about climate change and simple solutions. Muse Video and I, AshEl, ACE’s Northern California Education & Leadership Manager, arranged a special brainstorming session at the ACE headquarters to start creating a powerful narrative that would help shift behaviors and make it easy and cool to be apart of the solution. The animation was such a success that I had to do a follow up interview.

AshEL (ACE Educator):  What advice would you give to other students about educating their peers about climate change ?

Dontae 15’:  Be real about it. Stay focused….and mean it. Don’t be like a robot to them. Be a peer to them. Talk to them like you would talk to your friends.

AshEL(ACE Educator): Whose decision was it to do an animation?

Jake (Muse Video): “In the summer of 2012, when we were thinking of projects to work on surrounding climate change, I checked out the ACE multimedia presentation and got inspired. I thought that it would be cool to make something for MetWest students to do….not just making something that award-winning multimedia professional animators could do, but also something that young people could be involved in to learn the process and, yunno, make something for students-by students around climate change.

AshEL (ACE Educator): What was the learning process like to create the animation?

Hector 15’: We did tutorials with Adobe Illustrator. I created some of the characters.

Samaiyah 16’:  I llustrated some of the drawings for the video, scanned them on illustrator, and made them coming to life. I drew the

cars, the toxic spill, and the scene looking out of the window.

Karen 16’: I learned to make the characters into drawings with illustrator too.

AshEL(ACE Educator): How did you come up with the characters? What did you based the characters on and how did the climate change become a topic?

Dontae:  Jake mentioned it to us and brought us to the ACE headquarters and we had a conversation  and brainstorming session about it. The main character was based on a teenager having a wake up call about climate change. We then started to compare climate change with a sleeping giant because so many folks are sleeping on the climate and not really caring about it enough.

AshEL(ACE Educator): Who do you want to see this?

Dontae: It would be dope to show it to every high school in Oakland!

Samaiyah: Yeah, we want to show it to the youth, because we are the ones that will have to deal with it in the future.

AshEl (ACE Educator):  Did making this animation teach you more about climate change or how you saw yourself being more apart of the solution?

Dontae: I started to realize the difference in heat temperature because last summer there was a lot of heavy rains and at the same time in Southern California we had a lot of wildfires..that scared me a bit.

Samaiyah: It wasn’t really on my mind before, but then I started to learn the effects of it. I didn’t know it was as serious as it was. So, I started being more open to it, watching what I do and saving energy.

Thanks to the Muse Video for working with ACE to create a deeper hands on education experience about climate change while teaching animation skills. Thanks to the MetWest students for raising their voices and being open to learning something new!