As appeared in The Princeton Packet – article about our NJ filmmaking camps held at Princeton

As appeared in The Pittsburgh Tribune…

As appeared in The Pioneer Press…

As appeared in The Princeton Packet – article about our NJ filmmaking camps held at Princeton

June 30th, 2006 by: Ryan

Any s’mores at this camp will have to be toasted digitally

By Hilary Parker

It’s like something out of a movie over on the Princeton University campus, where a kickball game run amok is leading to mind travel and other crazy shenanigans.

Wait.

It is a movie – created by the students participating in the Digital Video Production course, one of the many camps offered at Princeton this summer at iD Tech Camps.

“The border between what’s real and what’s not gets sort of skewed,” said Noah Bogdonoff, the 14-year-old camper from New London, Conn., who plays the mind-traveling kickballer. Using Canon GL2 digital camcorders, the middle and high-school students in the digital video course recorded footage based on scripts they wrote and then headed back to the lab to doctor the images and add special effects.

While the video creators started with real footage of real people, many of the campers in the other iD Tech Camps such as the new 3D Character Modeling course and Video Game Creation, are creating worlds with no basis in reality.

“You get to choose what characters you want to put in and your own theme,” said 9-year-old Madison Kirton of Newtown, Pa., as she ably threw snowballs at the “bad guys” on top of an igloo. While her stellar aim (she hit them every time) will soon allow her to advance in the game, she’ll have to wait a little bit; she has to create the next level first.

The students aren’t the only participants at iD Tech camps experiencing a new reality; three of the instructors are participants in the American Institute for Foreign Study’s Camp America, an international program that brings people to the U.S. to work at a variety of summer camps throughout the country.

One Camp America participant, Zara Phang of Malaysia, England and Scotland, is well versed in computer science, having already completed three years of study on the subject at the University of Edinburgh. While she is working with computers at iD Tech camps this summer, the experience is entirely different from her time at university, she said, due to the interaction with the students.

“They have so much personality,” she said. “They’re very enthusiastic. When people start getting older, they hold back a little more.”

While computers are iD Tech Camps’ specialty, said director of the Princeton camps Jonathan Olshefski, the campers also participate in those ever-popular summer camp games like capture the flag and laser tag. A Temple University graduate with a degree in film and media arts and English literature, Mr. Olshefski is now in his second summer with iD Tech Camps, having served as assistant director of the Princeton program last year.

Beyond all the high-tech knowledge and gaming, he said, the campers get “basic human contact – it’s an opportunity for kids to get to know each other and learn how to interact.”

Apparently, some of the campers have picked up on this as well. Dalton Ryan, a 15-year-old from Long Island, N.Y., said iD Tech Camps is “awesome.” In explaining why he likes the camp, he mentioned the skills the gamers learn in order to create multi-leveled games they can play with their friends. And then, he continued talking about other favorite experiences during his week as an overnight camper, the non-technological ones.

“We hung out, we talk,” he said.