Bethel Park students record books for Children’s Hospital
Julianne Rosa, 17, and Harrison Zelt, 18, hold books featured in their project “Verbalize for Victory.”
Russell Finelsen, 14, and Dean Mancini, 15, record Ethan Wdowiak, 17, reading in front of a green screen to allow the images to splice onto pictures from the book.
Matt Dulavitch, 17, wraps up editing “Tip Tapping Toes.”
Young patients recuperating at Children’s Hospital in Lawrenceville will soon have another way to cope with the restlessness of recovery – a series of books brought to life. The books, like Dr. Seuss’s “Cat In The Hat,” are read by Bethel Park students as their voices and likenesses are integrated into a digital reproduction of the book that can be played back on a DVD. The idea came from students Harrison Zelt and Julianne Rosa, two seniors who started “Verbalize for Victory” last year, and are putting together the final pieces to hand off to the healthcare organization.
“This is to engage them in more than one way instead of someone just reading them a book. They can see the pictures on the screen and get involved with the story a bit more,” said Zelt, 18, who pitched the idea as a community service project to student government last year.
“With community service, I had heard of people reading to kids before, but I wanted to do something a little more permanent for kids,” he said.
So Zelt and Rosa enlisted the help of Brad Kszastowski’s Video II class to push out roughly a dozen books’ (about two hours of readings) worth of multimedia by mid-December.
“I would be teaching them video production with other material anyway, so these books – scanning the photos and pictures, recording themselves to overlay in the foreground at points – this is all stuff in the curriculum that lends itself to this project,” Kszastowski said.
“Recording the audio and video in front a green screen is one part, which takes a whole period, then it’s another two periods for editing and mastering the videos,” Rosa, 17, said.
“They’re doing great work and learning the basics of video editing and production, but with this specifically, they’re also learning project management. This is a product other kids will be using over and over, so it’s on them to push out the best stuff they can while keeping track of their deadlines and managing time efficiently each class period,” Kszastowski said.
Zelt said when the book DVDS are complete, they plan to make it a field trip event to drop them off and read to patients in person.