Looking for a way to keep warm this winter that doesn't involve you sitting in front of the TV in your pajamas? Join a new book club exploring John Muir, father of the National Parks and founder of the Sierra Club. The book club, sponsored by the Oak Park Park District, will meet once a month for three months on Tuesdays, Jan. 24, Feb. 21, and March 21, at Austin Gardens Environmental Education Center, 167 Forest Ave., in Oak Park. There is no charge, but please register here.
Who has not experienced delight and awe when they catch sight of a monarch butterfly? But the population of this beloved species has declined by 90 percent over the past 20 years. Communities locally and nationally are mobilizing to increase monarch habitat. That’s where you come in. It turns out that urban and suburban areas are the monarch’s best hope for recovery. Join us to launch this initiative on January 31st!
This year, a group of One Earth volunteers pooled their resources to create a matching gift opportunity for #Giving Tuesday.
Any investment you make on or before Tuesday, November 29, will be matched, dollar for dollar, up to $2,000. That will make a total impact of $4,000 to support the 2017 One Earth Film Festival and the year-round efforts of Green Community Connections.
By Lisa Biehle Files
One Earth Film Festival offers three filmmaking workshops for kids from 3rd through 8th grades which are just for fun or to help develop skills to enter the Young Filmmakers Contest.
High school students in need of extra help with filmmaking may partake of artist/teacher Jeff Lassahn’s free tutelage from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Wednesdays, at the Chicago Public Library’s YouMedia, 400 S. State St., in Chicago. Call 312-747-5260 first to confirm his availability.
Live Action Workshops for Grades 3 to 8 Live action filmmaking workshops are split into two age groups, grades 3 to 5 and grades 6 to 8. Each age group will have two classes lasting 2-1/2 hours each on Sundays, Dec. 4 and 11. Please bring an ipad or tablet, if possible. The first class will cover story, lighting, and audio, with plenty of time for hands on learning. The following week, the focus will be editing and production. Kids will have time to shoot additional footage during the week between classes.
These two workshops will be held in collaboration with the River Forest Park District at the Depot, 401 Thatcher Ave. Register for grades 3 to 5 here, and for grades 6 to 8 here. Class times for the former go from noon to 2:30 p.m. and for the latter, from 3 to 5:30 p.m. Cost is $30 for residents of River Forest and $35 for non-residents. Water and a nut-free snack will be provided.
Artist/teacher Jeff Lassahn will guide these workshops with help from freelance film editor Lucy Coria as well as animators David Wall and Lauren Travers (more below).
Animation Workshop for Grades 3 to 8Animators David Wall and Lauren Travers will teach students stop-motion animation using iPads, animation stations, and a special in-house app provided by Steve and Kate’s Camp. Legos will be available, and students are also welcome to bring drawing materials.
This class will take place from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 3, at St. Vincent Ferrer School Gymnasium, 1515 Lathrop, in River Forest. Cost is $30 per person. Water and a nut-free snack will be provided. Register here.
Jeff Lassahn
Jeff LassahnFor the past four years, Jeff has worked as an after-school teacher and mentor to high school students at Chicago Public Library’s YouMedia. There he conducts workshops in photography, video, art, and graphic design using new methods for informal learning.
Jeff is also an artist with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (2009). Based on the message he tries to convey through his art, Jeff experiments with media. As he writes on LinkedIn: “I am passionate about creating, whether it is with centuries old tools or cutting-edge equipment--and I am especially passionate about working with others on these techniques.”
Themes for his artwork are inequality, war, and politics. “I work with coloring books, digital images, three-dimensional sculpture, interactive sculpture, screen printing, lithography, drawing, painting—it’s a long list. I almost never do the same thing more than once,” he says.
In October, Jeff’s artwork was shown in Illinois, Wisconsin, Tennessee, New Jersey, and New York State (sample below). His film work has screened at festivals around the world, from Egypt to Great Britain.
Jeff’s goal for the Young Filmmakers Workshops is skill development, no matter the student’s level. He adds, “I’d like to show that editing is not just a mechanical step or routine work but that it is also a creative process. The kids will make important decisions in editing that affect what they say and how entertaining or interesting their films can be.”
Lauren Travers Wall
Lauren TraversLauren developed her passion for animation through a stop-motion class at DePaul University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in digital cinema in 2013.
“I was totally infatuated,” she said. “I think it was the magic of it—building an entire world from your imagination. You can make everything from scratch, build every set, prop, and puppet, and then animate it into life. ”
Since graduating, Lauren has worked on “Banana Season,” “Gardening at Night,” and “Stage Three” as art director, art assistant, and production designer. Currently, she interns for Chicago Loop Alliance, creating holiday videos.
Recently, Lauren and co-teacher David Wall (her fiancée) created the Claymation music video for the song, “Fanger” by The Kickback. After 6 months of work shooting 2500 pictures, they premiered this video in June: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63pKPPuayMU
Lauren explained, “Stop-motion animation is extremely labor intensive. It’s not difficult. It just takes a lot of time and patience, patience, patience.”
Both Lauren and David have worked for Steve and Kate’s Camp during summers to help with their live action and stop-motion studio. Steve and Kate’s Camp owns 16 work stations for animation with iPads and in-house software, which will be on loan to us for the Young Filmmakers Workshop on December 3.
David Arthur Wall
David Arthur Wall In his own words, David is part of “The You Tube generation,” meaning he grew up posting videos on You Tube with friends from the time he was 13 years old.
Fortunately, he channeled this interest into a bachelor’s degree in film and video from Columbia College Chicago, graduating the same year as Lauren: 2013.
While in college, he initially focused on directing film, but later diversified and developed skills in animation and editing.
Much of David’s work has involved filming stories about schools and children. He created an admission video for a Chiaravalle Montessori School in Evanston, made two training videos for Right at School (a nationwide after-school program), and was filmmaker-in-residence for Steve and Kate’s Camp. The latter position involved creating a film each week highlighting life at the camp in addition to helping kids develop their nascent projects.
He is excited about teaching the Young Filmmakers animation workshop and says: “Stop-motion is an art form that has been around since the beginning of film. I mean, King Kong was made using stop-motion. It’s the exact same technique today, but what is amazing is that we, and even kids, can do this with an iPad now.”
David and Lauren are also collaborating on a comic, stop-motion, web series which they’ve been working on, incrementally, for two years. Patience, patience, patience.
Lucy Coria will return as an assistant teacher. Read about her in last year’s filmmaking workshop article here.
Petersburg by Jeff Lassahn
I love good children’s books. Some of my most cherished moments from my children’s growing-up years were reading stories to them that inspired and nurtured me as much as them! So when I came across this list “16 Great Children’s Books on Nature and the Environment” I knew that I had to share it.
By Laurie Casey
Many people nourish their lives by making writing a daily practice, like eating and exercise. Oak Park-based artist Sallie Wolf gave a presentation on nature journaling to West Cook Wild Ones last month. She showed off some of the more than 100 journals she has created over more than 50 years. These beautiful documents trace her most intimate thoughts, travels, goals, garden wildlife, and even the moon in the sky.
"My journals are a combination of an anthropologist’s field notes, a writer’s notebook, and an artist’s sketchbook," says Wolf.
Sallie Wolf suggested creative methods for journaling at a West Cook Wild Ones meeting. Photo by Cassandra West.
At the workshop, she walked participants through her method of creating simple journals and then explored the different ways she works in them: writing, drawing and collage. Wolf is not a perfectionist, and she uses her journals to practice, play, observe and explore. She encourages beginning journal keepers to read The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron.
Her remarkable body of work is deeply personal, containing ink sketches and watercolors created en plein air during her travels or from behind her window looking out into her garden. For inspiration, you can see Wolf's moon project, which she derived from 20 years of journal entries at her website: http://www.salliewolf.com/moon.html
While she does go over lines that don't look right in the moment, she never crosses out her mistakes and enjoys looking back to see her skills progress. Many of these doodlings later became finished works of art. Others appeared in her books, such as The Robin Makes A Laughing Sound: A Birder’s Journal, a collection of observations told in poetry, lists, questions, notes and sketches.
Originally trained as an anthropologist, Wolf writes in dense lines in stark black ink. Her daily journaling practice traces her goals for the year, as well as things on her to-do lists. Regular, daily features in her journal also include notes on the birds in her backyard, the blooms in her garden, the day's weather and diagrams of the positioning of the moon that have become an art installation.
In her frequent and far-flung travels, Wolf always brings her journal, fountain pen, ink and water colors to record nature's beauty. She says her sketches help her capture the scene's emotion and proportions better than a camera, which distorts the view and creates artificial distance between her eye and the scene.
Wolf uses many store-bought journals, but she also enjoys making her own. At the workshop, Wolf demonstrated a basic method of book binding. She folds 8 or more 8.5" by 11" pages in half. For the cover, Wolf enjoys recycling materials whenever possible, such as cardboard from pads of sketch paper, wallpaper samples and even birdseed bags. Then she uses an awl to punch 3 holes through the spine of the cover and paper. Finally, she weaves a piece of jute or yarn between the holes to tie the cover and paper together.
Visit Sallie at her studio, 331B Harrison St., in the Oak Park Arts District by appointment, or see her website at www.salliewolf.com
On August 17, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a group of civic leaders gathered at the WMS Boathouse on the banks of the north branch of the Chicago River to release Our Great Rivers, a vision produced through a community-wide collaboration led by the Chicago Community Trust, Friends of the Chicago River and the Metropolitan Planning Council.
There are many reasons Solar energy is ‘disruptive’. The term carries with it massive environmental, economic, social, and political weight. Energy produced by Solar PV systems is clean; no carbon emissions or pollution is generated for the 20+ years a typical system will operate. Additionally, the generated power earns the owner SRECS (renewable energy credits) used by businesses to offset their dirty pollution footprint. Most PV systems can be designed to reach ROI (return on investment) well within the lifetime of the equipment, and thus they create monetary profits thereafter. System owners are insulated from utility rate hikes and inflation and are less dependent on external energy sources.
