Social community web sites such as YouTube allow teens to share their digital creations with one another. YouTube is largely dominated by short films, photographic video, and diary-style media that members create, upload, and share with one another. After viewing homemade films by teenagers on the YouTube web site, I noticed some different approaches that youth utilize when making their films.

“Spur of the Moment” video footage seems to be the theme for the majority of teen-created films on YouTube. Within these films, the footage is not scripted, but rather photographic, serving as a record of time. An example of this is Kyle Gone Crazed, a film where the videographer spontaneously captures a moment within the school library as he badgers his friends with on-the-fly humor. This type of film is appealing because it captures the “spirit” of the moment. They often seem like inside jokes between the person filming the event, and the person being filmed.

Planned and scripted videos by teenagers are less abundant, but they certainly are being created.Within these films, teens have created music videos, short dramas, school video projects, or improvised scripts with a purpose. An example of this is the Ghost Busters Music Video, which obviously required work on behalf of the teens to brainstorm script ideas, capture multiple scenes, sequentially arrange the footage, and queue the music.

As a librarian working with teens to produce digital media, what film-style would you suggest for a video project? Obviously the on-the-fly film requires less effort and a video with multiple scene changes might take a long time to produce. If you and the teens are unfamiliar with video editing, then it’s probably best to stick with something as minimal as possible. However, we don’t want to limit creativity, so why not try and get the best of both worlds?

For example, the Dewey Decimal Query shows a young teen asking for the Dewey number of the Science Fiction books. It is funny because his tone of voice sounds very geeky. This humor was obviously planned, but the skills needed to edit the clip required minimal effort as there is only one scene in the video. I would advise that our video projects start out small such as in the case with the Dewey Decimal Query film. Teen media groups can build up to the bigger projects such as the aforementioned Ghost Busters Music Video, after having more familiarity with the technology.