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Seattle teens take second in international digital media awards

An image from Seattle teens' winning video collaboration "A Questions is."

An image from Seattle teens’ winning video collaboration “The Questions is.”

Teens at Delridge and Rainier community centers received second place in an international digital media competition as part of the 2015 Adobe Youth Voices awards.

Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) empowers students to develop digital media skills to inspire change in their communities. AYV is a global program that has about 250,000 participating youth from 60 countries. Adobe provides students with access to audio/visual software and mentoring and collaboration opportunities.

Seattle Parks’ RecTech Youth Media Institute job training programs at Delridge Community Center and Rainier Beach Community Center have been participating in AYV for several years. For this year’s AYV awards competition, Seattle teens worked with eight other sites in three countries to animate a poem by Hollis Wong-Wear, a Grammy nominated Seattle poet. Each site was assigned five lines of the poem to illustrate using a beta application for iPad.

The teens’ video was called “The Question is,” and explored the question of how to grow up.

“The teens learned to use the software and were excited by the potential of what they could achieve with it,” RecTech Site Lead Leslie Howle said. “They related to the self-discovery theme expressed in the Hollis Wong poem, and it served as a provocation for their creativity. They also liked seeing what students in other cities in the US and UK created and feeling like they were part of a larger community of youth producing digital media work.”

There were 1,575 projects submitted to this year’s awards and 15 winners were selected in different categories. Seattle Parks’ teens’ collaboration took second in the animation category.

Watch the winning video.