Lights, Cameras, Action!

It isn’t every day that a TV award show inspires a whole new direction in one’s artistic life, but a few years ago, that’s what happened to me. I was watching the Independent Spirit Awards, that hip and laid-back paean to independent cinema celebrated annually the evening before the Oscars. During the program, several up-and-coming filmmakers won grants to finish their work and one of them, a woman, invited “anybody out there who has something to say” to embrace the medium of film to say it. Her words didn’t exactly send a lightning bolt to my brain, but a small, possibly 60-watt bulb did switch on. I’d always used photographs to tell the stories in my books, but should I explore using video?

Since I’d never even used a video or movie camera at that point, my first step was to determine how serious I was about this new outlet. After due consideration, I decided to buy a video camera, with some advice from people in the know. I choose a Canon that uses tapes, rather than one that stores everything on an internal hard drive, because it somehow felt better to have evidence of my movie shoots that I could hold in my hand and store as backup. With memories of my dad’s 8-millimeter camera from the 1950s in my head, I was astonished at the exquisite technology that’s now available to anyone with a few bucks. Skill, however, is another story.

I got my feet wet by shooting footage of a friend’s birthday party at a bowling alley, then did some video oral histories with my dad and the father of another friend. Concurrently, I started taking One-to-One lessons at the Apple store, learning how to use iMovie software to edit the footage I shot. Making movies in this way is hugely empowering—something that millions have discovered before me, as evidenced by the fact that people upload hundreds of thousands of videos onto YouTube daily, according to the site’s Fact Sheet. Well, better late than never.

As much as I enjoy the act of capturing movement and sound, I have a constant internal dialogue going on about whether to use my still or video camera. Sometimes video is an obvious choice. Still pictures of my once-in-a-lifetime attempt at karaoke in 2009 would not have the same entertainment value as the video footage that my friend and I shot. (Though those who watched the video might have appreciated the silence of a dramatic photograph of me at the mike.) But I like the ability of a still photo to communicate both information and mystery at the same time. When I look at a photograph, I wonder what happened just before and just after it was taken, even as I pore over the details of the moment that was frozen in time. I think at heart, I’ll always be a still photograph kind of gal.

In the interest of meeting a challenge head-on, however, I decided to make a trailer for my new book, Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way), which is finally hitting the stores this Tuesday, January 11. The trailer mixes original footage that I shot (behind the opening titles) with still photographs and some dandy archival film of women awheel. The process of gathering and organizing the images and editing the video was maddening but fun—and so engrossing that I barely noticed the developing blizzard outside my window. (Not surprising, writing the script was the easy part.) It was exciting to think about subject matter I knew so well in, literally, a whole new light. While I don’t plan to give up my day job, I want to continue exploring this other medium. It is, indeed, another compelling way to tell a story.

Check out my book trailer here.

Great Discoveries While Researching

When it comes to kids’ hands-on science activities I’m like a well-seasoned cookbook author. It’s hard for me to find a procedure I haven’t seen before in some incarnation or other. I own a library of kid’s activity books going back to the 19th century. I’ve scoured children’s magazines and the internet collecting files of printouts for future use. And of course there is my own extensive experience of prowling up and down supermarket aisles looking for products that could reveal some scientific principle other than the consumer objectives they are designed to meet. Often, at schools, kids will share the science tricks they know with me. So far, thousands of tricks later, there have been no surprises. So when I come across something simple to do and very revealing about a familiar subject that I have never known before, it is a true “Eureka!” experience, which I figure is worth the price of the book. Here are a few of them.

While researching one of my newest books, Your Body Battles a Cold, I was speaking to a children’s cold researcher, Dr. Birgit Winther, at the University of Virginia. She told me that the nose is like a computer. If you breathe down on a mirror, your nostrils will leave two circles of condensation, one larger than the other. That’s because one nostril is dominant and taking in more air than the other one. If you do this several hours later, the other nostril will be dominant. In other words your nostrils take turns, alternating the one that takes in the most air and you don’t even know it! I had a dentist appointment on the day I learned this delightful factoid so I was I excited to share this discovery with her. She was equally delighted to learn it because she looks a people’s nostrils all that time and had noticed the discrepancy in size. Now she knew why.

Whenever possible I’ve learned there is nothing like first-hand research. So I visited a Herr’s potato chip factory while researching Junk Food. Proper packaging is the secret to giving potato chips a shelf life. To stay fresh, chips must be protected from light and oxygen. (If you want to see for yourself, just leave a bowl of chips in sunshine for several hours and then taste them. ) So they are sold in foil-lined light-proof bags filled with nitrogen gas, which also cushions them against breakage. “Aha!” I concluded. Since nitrogen doesn’t support combustion I figured that you can extinguish a flame with the gas in a bag of potato chips. The procedure for doing this is in the book.

Interviewing scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, I discovered that you can taste hot peppers with your wrist! Here’s a video I made to prove it. This past weekend I edited yet another video to prove that you can toast a marshmallow with a nut. And here’s one that shows the difference between regular and diet sodas as measured by density. Most of the time I don’t include the scientific explanations in the videos but in this one, I thought I could take one small step in fighting childhood obesity. My book We DareYou! is full of such discoveries.

The great joy in my work is stumbling across new insights about the nitty-gritty of daily life that most people never stop to think about. I learned how to do this in elementary school. As an adult I recreate what I loved most about school for myself on a daily basis. There are more of these unique discoveries in my books than I can count. I love that I can share them with my readers and I hope my writing conveys my enthusiasm with the implicit invitation: “You gotta try this!”

Making a Living

With one exception that lasted about a year, I have not held a real job since 1969. I am not rich but I have managed to financially support myself and my two sons as a single mother and put a few dollars away for a rainy day (which is now). Needless to say, I have had a number of white knuckle months, wondering if I should throw in the towel on my free-lance lifestyle. I read want ads and reassured myself that I was qualified for a number of different kinds of jobs including teaching and public relations, but then I would decide to just hang in there one more day. And the money gods always came through. Over the years my income has had its ups and downs but has been reasonably steady. However, its nature has changed. Early in my career most of my income came from writing and I did very little public speaking. In the last fifteen years, more than half of my income came from speaking engagements, with advance money and royalties making up the other half. There were a few very good years in there when I could relax—the money just came, mostly from a very busy lecture business. The increasing importance of paid speaking engagements compared to paid writing may be echoing what has happened to artists in the music business. Years ago, musicians gave concerts to sell albums. Today, in the era of 99-cent downloads from I-Tunes, concerts have become the big money makers for recording artists and their recorded songs have become the necessary credentials to be in the concert business. People seem to want live contact with artists even if it is from a bird's eye view high in stadium seats. In the olden days, when I visited schools, kids were very familiar with my books. Lately, schools use contact with authors to motivate and initiate students' interest in books. The recent economic downturn has made huge inroads into my lucrative lecture business and has me dusting off my financial survival skills, which you may find useful.

My focus has always been on getting work rather than cutting costs. (How much can we cut, anyhow, working from home?) Go to conventions and meetings. Join professional organizations. Network, network, network. Collect business cards and make notes. I carry a little spiral-bound notebook and tiny stapler. Then I staple people’s cards into the notebook with notes for follow-up. Listen to what people are looking for. Gone are the days when publishers asked writers for ideas and books were sold over lunch. (There are no more free lunches.) Recognize that samples of your work may just be calling cards. Publishers are looking for suppliers of product, not just product itself. Don’t let rejection affect your personal self-worth. It’s all about the marketplace and publishers are now doing their own share of sweating. Timing is a key factor over which one has little control. If someone offers you work that is not your usual thing, learn to say, "Let me think about it." Never reject something out of hand. Remember, a learning experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. My marching orders for taking on a job:
1. You might learn something
2. It might lead someplace
3. It pays well.
If a job fulfills two out of three of these criteria, take it, including work that pays nothing (like writing a blog).

Don’t be afraid to invest in yourself. This could mean acquiring new skills that could eventually be marketable. In this downturn, I have learned how to be a videographer and I am set up to do videoconferencing. Neither has yet given me a ROI (return on investment) but I am hopeful. Investing in yourself may also mean spending some money on a website, advertising and promotion.

Follow the money. The economic stimulus package has funding for teachers’ professional development and for literacy under Title I. Grant money pays for school visits. Do some research and provide it to your market.

Do something every day that could potentially lead to work. This means sitting and thinking every day, “What CAN I do?” It allows you to be proactive, keeps hope alive and anxiety at bay. I keep a list of all my breads cast upon the waters. Currently I have sixteen active items on my list.

It also helps to have a solvent spouse and to be collecting social security.

A Long-Distance School Visit

In this economy, schools seem to be cutting back on extras like author visits. So I’ve decided to embark on yet another (I’ve recently taken up creating and publishing videos on my website) technological direction—video conferencing. This way I can be beamed to schools without leaving my home. I can see the kids and they can see me. It’s not like doing an assembly program for a large group and it’s not like being there in person. But it allows me to do some unique things, such as directing a collaborative project that is unique to my own work.

Although I have done video conferences from a school that equipped for them, I knew nothing of the necessary technology. I found out that you need software to connect to the protocol used by the school systems, you need a webcam and, if you’re going to do a lot of video conferencing, you need something called a static IP address, all of which costs money—about $400. So I plunged ahead and within a week I was up and running for the first video conference from my own home office.

As an experiment, I contacted a wonderful school I visited last year that is set up for and quite familiar with video conferencing. Since I’m trying to get kids to make videos of tricks from my new book We Dare You! the school librarian offered participation in the project to the after-school science club, figuring that maybe12 kids would be the right number. The next day 42 kids signed up! Since a video conference can comfortably accommodate only about 25 kids, we decided to split the group into two introductory sessions.

I gave my first video conference last week. It felt strange putting on makeup and lipstick to sit in front of my computer. The kids were far more comfortable looking at me on a screen than I was talking to them. But I could hold up and show them my video camera and say, “This is what my video camera looks like, this is what the video tape looks like.” I could explain how to shoot a video and I invited my neighbor, a network TV news director to appear with me give the kids some tips on how to shoot a video. I could email a handout to the librarian summarizing the lesson. I could watch them watching my videos on the large screen. (They laughed at my material. Very reassuring!) And most importantly, I could make personal contact with them and answer their questions directly. It’s a whole new world.

On Becoming a Videographer Late in Life (Part II)

Learning a new communications skill late in life means facing a steep learning curve. I approached it one step at a time. Here’s what I did to become a videographer:


Step 1: I bought a Sony 25X Optical Zoom Megapixel Handycam. It is the garden-variety point and shoot type; no worries about lighting or focusing. I also purchased a tripod since I was told that my hands might not be steady and a jerky picture is the sure sign of an amateur. I pressed my ten-year-old grandsons into service. Since they come from different families who live hundreds of miles apart, I’m lucky to get them together one day a year. The day of the shoot last August was that day. We all had a lot of fun videotaping them doing science tricks. My husband shot me and the boys introducing the project: http://www.vickicobb.com/Videos/introtowedareyou.html



I discovered that I had to acquire a new set of skills I had not anticipated—to become a director. (I learned a lot about camera angles and extra shots to cut to.) I proudly showed off my beginning efforts to the boys’ parents by hooking the camera to the TV and relished their enthusiastic response. On a roll, later that month, I made more videos without realizing I had rewound the tape. Much to my horror, I made the sickening discovery that I had taped over most of the stuff shot that first day. One trial learning. I won’t make that mistake again!

Step 2: It became time to bite the bullet and face the problem of editing the videos. I read that I-Movie, a program for Macs, was the easiest way to go. A PC user for all these years, I not only had to learn a new program and skill but I had to go into a whole different computer system. I walked into the Apple Store in the Westchester Mall, where they are well staffed to handle the neophyte buyer. I told the personable and knowledgeable salesman, Mike, what I wanted to do. He quickly put together exactly what I needed. I bought a MacBook Pro, with the Leopard OS X, 2 GB of memory, and a processing speed of 2.4 Ghz. (This means nothing to me but you might find the specifics valuable.) Best of all, for an additional $100 I could receive 52 hours of private instruction with their platoon of mavens called One-on-One. Right away I was taught how to upload my videos from my Handycam, set up projects, and assemble the clips into my little videos. I was on my way, only slightly off the ground, on my ascent up the learning curve. I should say, at this point, that my issues as a videographer, were technical, not creative. If you know how to tell a story and have worked with artists on books, you will not have a problem knowing how to put a story together using videotape.


Step 3: The next problem was to get the finished videos into a format for the web. The Mac will save the videos in the Quicktime format (.mov files) but PCs need a special player for it. The best format for the web is Flash. Ninety-eight percent of all computers come with a Flash Player, which can be also downloaded free. Videos encoded in Flash (.swf files) can’t be easily downloaded by viewers so there is some copyright protection, which was important to me as I may want to put all the videos on a DVD someday and perhaps sell it with the book. When I asked the Apple folk for a program that will convert the .mov file to a Flash file, they were at a loss. I was already ahead of them on this part of the learning curve! I did find a trial program online for the Mac but the company went out of business before I could purchase it. My PC guy solved the problem for me but it is a little cumbersome. I make a video on my Mac, save it to my Flash Drive, move it to my PC, and convert it with Flash Studio 2. Finally, I use Dreamweaver to post it on my site. (So I now have to learn how to be my own webmaster.)


How’d I do? Check them out: http://www.vickicobb.com/vicki


This journey to teach an old dog new tricks started six months ago. Was it worth it? Here’s the breakdown: Handycam and tripod: $400. MacBook Pro and additional software: $4000. The joy of creating and publishing videos of my work without depending on anyone else: Priceless!

On Becoming a Videographer Late in Life (Part I)

Ever write some material you thought was a natural for the movies? What writer hasn’t? I have long thought that my collections of tricks and stunts based on science (Bet You Can’t!, Bet You Can!, etc.) were an entertaining way to introduce science to the public. I was no stranger to the camera. Early in my career I starred in my own cable show, The Science Game, and wrote and performed in 23 half hours of video. Later I did a stint as one of the original staff writers for Good Morning America. But the idea of using my own material for the small screen, hovered in the back of my mind. Over the years I had buttonholed television executives and written several proposals for kids’ science shows. I had been encouraged from time to time by interested parties but the money never changed hands, at least when it came to videos. But last year, I was approached by Skyhorse Publishing Company to create a new and very large book out of five recently out-of-print books. The editor called and said, “I loved these books when I was a kid,” (which certifies me as a senior citizen.)
We struck the deal and this month WE DARE YOU! HUNDREDS OF FUN SCIENCE BETS, CHALLENGES, AND EXPERIMENTS YOU CAN DO AT HOME was released for sale.



Reworking that tried and true material for the new book started me thinking about making videos again. In 2001 I had hired a videographer to make a seven-minute video of me and my then ten-year-old granddaughter doing experiments to promote a science fair book published by Scholastic. I scripted the material but the videographer and her crew shot it and she edited it. I have been giving it away ever since to the schools where I make appearances. It was a good investment but it was expensive. Now I wanted to create short (under 2 minutes each) videos of kids doing these tricks and make them available to everyone on my website in conjunction with the book. How could I possibly hire someone to fulfill my vision of a video library of almost 300 tricks? The answer is obvious. Modern technology has leveled the playing field. I would learn how to do it myself and invite the world to send me uncut footage of kids doing these tricks.



I am not afraid of learning something new. In 1983, I bought my first computer, a Kaypro II. I plunged into teaching myself word processing by retyping a work in progress, a chemistry book. In those days there was no such thing as drag and drop, the mouse hadn’t yet been invented. Word processing meant that you had to format the work yourself with keystrokes. It was an intense learning period with lots of swearing and tearing out of hair. I had my own publishing company then. Here’s how our first (and only) book project went: The first month I wrote a new book and had it professionally edited. The next month I sent it out for typesetting using a modem and Dial-A-Typesetter. The third month was used to make the prepress mechanicals and we had bound books after four months. Unheard of speed, in 1983, for producing a book! That was the fun part. The book did not sell well and I received a learning experience, which is what you get when you don’t get what you want. I learned I did not want to be a publisher.



But times are different now. If you have a website you are a publisher. It would be possible for me to do it all, write videos, shoot them, edit them, narrate the voice-over, add music, and publish them on my website. The fact that I was coming from a dead start, that I had never even held a video camera could not be a deterrent. I know from experience that the steepness of a learning curve is best faced one step at a time. My next post will give you the details of how I learned this new craft, in case you’re interested. If not, and you still want to see how I did, check them out: http://www.vickicobb.com/vicki