Adina’s Deck was honored with the award for Best Short Film for a Young Audience, 2008 by the Eugene, Oregon International Film Festival! We want to thank Mike Dilley, President and Director of the Festival for organizing this fantastic event. We were so disappointed we couldn’t make it (as it conflicted with the Kid’s First Film awards of which we’d previously committed to attending).

This plaque is gorgeous! Thank you again Mike, and Congratulations Ep. 1 Cast & Crew!

This article was printed yesterday in the Contra Costa Times and also syndicated in the San Jose Mercury News and the Valley Times. You can read the original version here.

Filmmaker exposes cyberbullies
Middle schoolers learn that words hurt
By Jackie Burrell

The girls huddle around a laptop, recoiling in dismay as a hate site unfurls across the screen. “What?” Skye wails. “You did this?”

– “Adina’s Deck”

Filmmaker Debbie Heimowitz had never heard of cyberbullying until she started talking to middle school counselors.

The Stanford grad student had been volunteering at middle schools in Redwood City and Menlo Park, and looking for an appropriate master’s thesis topic when she first came across this insidious, anonymous form of harassment carried out on hate-filled Web sites, with anonymous posts and spiteful rumors that spread like wildfire.

“It fascinated me,” says Heimowitz. “We didn’t have this problem when I was in middle school.”

What especially struck Heimowitz was that middle schoolers couldn’t connect their virtual actions to consequences in real life.

Cyberbullying makes headlines when tragedy strikes, as it did last year when a 13-year-old killed herself after a friend’s mother set up a fake MySpace page and then publicly humiliated her.

While that particular incident took place in Missouri, cyberbullying happens every day, in every city.

Some 42 percent of kids have been cyberbullied at least once, according to a 2004 study by iSafe, a non-profit Internet safety education foundation, and 58 percent have dealt with mean or hurtful public messages. And a 2006 University of New Hampshire study found that 75 percent to 80 percent of young teens, ages 12 to 14, had been bullied online. Experts at iSafe call cyberbullying a “24 hour per day, seven days a week online bashing,” that slips under the parental radar because there are no black eyes or torn clothes to give it away.

Heimowitz was appalled.

A former film student with three years’ experience in Hollywood’s film and television studios, Heimowitz was working on her master’s in Stanford’s learning, design and technology department at the time. Suddenly, her master’s thesis project seemed obvious — make a film that duplicates Disney Channel production values, but offers a poignant, educational wallop. Use a fictional story to demonstrate the real-life consequences of heartless behavior, and give it a dash of Nancy Drew and Veronica Mars.

“Adina’s Deck” emerged with help from friend Jason Azicri, a screenwriter and counseling psychology grad student at Santa Clara University. The script centered on a group of four middle school girls for whom cyberbullying is deeply personal. One is a target –another, a former perpetrator. Using tech-savvy tactics, the foursome sets out to discover who is tormenting “Skye,” a popular eighth-grader played by Lafayette teen Kelcie Stranahan. The students chase down IP addresses, track cell signals and do their Nancy Drew-style detecting online.

“It’s such emotionally heavy material,” says Heimowitz. “It made sense to teach it in a way that showed the stories that were happening to the victims and the bullies — and to show empathy for the bullies. A lot of the time they don’t even realize they’re being bullies. What they think is very insignificant could be causing severe psychological problems for their victims.”

“It shows kids what’s really going on,” says Kelcie. “At one of the premiere (audience) talks, we really got to talk about it.”

Cyberbullying was considered funny at one Redwood City middle school where Heimowitz volunteered. The pranksters had no clue about the impact. Not so in Menlo Park.

“At Menlo Park, cyberbullying tended to be more intentionally mean, malicious,” the Castro Valley resident says. “(But) at both schools, the kids were doing exactly the same things.”

Heimowitz incorporated all those things into the film, then started casting. She’d done casting before, when she worked for Warner Bros., but this time Heimowitz was nervous, afraid no one would show up.

But the “Adina” casting call drew hundreds of young actors from across Northern California. By the time Heimowitz was finished, she had signed Kelcie, a Campolindo freshman whose acting resume included a bit part in “The Kite Runner,” Stephanie Cameron from the Peninsula, and others from Modesto, Sacramento and around the Bay Area — plus some very familiar extras.

Heimowitz cameos as a science teacher, and her dad portrays a school principal. Her grandmother plays the librarian.

Now, the gospel of “Adina” is spreading. The 30-minute film has been accepted at five film festivals, including this weekend’s International Children’s Film Festival at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. And there has been considerable interest from teachers, parents and school administrators. Walnut Creek’s Seven Hills school has a copy, and the film’s cast was featured at San Ramon’s recent middle school conference.

So naturally, there’s a sequel in the works — two of them, actually. Heimowitz and Azicri are working on one script about online predators and dating, and another on cheating and plagiarism. And “Adina” will have to break out her laptop once more.

Reach Jackie Burrell at jburrell@bayareanewsgroup.com. Read the aPARENTly Speaking blog at http://www.ibabuzz.com/aparentlyspeaking.

LEARN MORE

Hey All!

Adina’s Deck will have a booth at the Cradle to College Family Expo tomorrow from 10am-5pm.
It’s at Encino Park between Balboa and Genesta in Encino, CA. Stop by and Visit!

For more info visit Mommywood.com 

Jason and I spent today filming PSA/Commercials for Larry Magid and Anne Collier of Connect Safely for their upcoming YouTube channel. Some of our Adina’s Deck actors returned for the first day of shooting. If you submitted and have not heard back, we will still be notifying people this week. You can submit your picture for consideration at: adinasdeck@gmail.com ATTN: Megan.  Parents and teens, Connect Safely is a great place for Internet Safety tips and Discussions! When the videos are posted we will make sure to post the link.

Thanks so much to Suzie Boss for writing this great article. You can read the entire article here:

Cinema vs. Cyberbullies: Using Filmmaking to Fight Online Harassment

By Suzie Boss

6/17/08
When Debbie Heimowitz talks about cyberbullying at school assemblies or presents training events for teachers, she speaks with authority. She knows the statistics. She understands the potential for real harm if bullies use the anonymity of technology to gang up on their victims.

But she doesn’t just emphasize scary stories. “I want kids to feel empowered online,” she says. “I want them to know that they can learn about technology and use it to do cool things. I want them to see role models, other kids using technology to help their friends. And if cyberbullying is happening, I want them to know that they can go to someone for help.”

To get across her dual message of empowerment and awareness, Heimowitz has created an engaging thirty-minute film and supporting resources designed to foster better-informed conversation about cyberbullying. Adina’s Deck stars four middle school girls who become cybersleuths to solve an online bullying mystery. They combine the bravado of Nancy Drew with the tech savvy of Silicon Valley veterans as they figure out who is behind a string of anonymous text messages, phone calls, and Web posts that take an increasingly threatening tone.

Heimowitz, who developed Adina’s Deck in 2007 while she was a graduate student in education at Stanford University, told me she didn’t start with a focus on cyberbullying. Her original idea, she recalls with a laugh, “was a fourth-grade project about the gold rush, a topic I found fascinating!” But conversations with a school counselor and with her mother, a middle school special education teacher, opened her eyes.

Heimowitz was surprised to learn that cyberbullying is a problem at her old middle school and at many other schools. “I thought bullying was only about boys beating up other boys,” she admits. But as she dug into the research and did additional surveys at schools serving diverse populations in the Bay Area, she learned that cyberbullying is a growing concern that cuts across genders, age groups, and socioeconomic levels.

An organization called i-SAFE conducted a survey of students in grades 4-8 and found that 42 percent of them have been bullied online and 53 percent have said “something mean or hurtful” to another person online. What’s more, most kids keep the experience to themselves; 58 percent of children who have been bullied on the Web victims admit that they did not tell their parents or another adult about the incidents.

Making a film to raise awareness about the issue was an obvious choice for Heimowitz. She studied film as an undergraduate at the University of California of Berkeley and then spent three years working in Hollywood. Her long-term goal is to create films with the production quality of the big-name studios but with an educational message that will engage students and address teachers’ learning goals.

To make sure Adina’s Deck resonated with her target audience, Heimowitz went straight to the source: middle school girls. Through Citizen Schools, a San Francisco Bay Area after-school program she has volunteered for, Heimowitz recruited a focus group of girls for a ten-week apprenticeship in filmmaking. They acted as script consultants, providing feedback that gave the film the ring of authenticity. They even suggested cool names for the characters — Skye, Melody, Clara, and Adina — and helped develop the four personas.

Although cyberbullying affects both boys and girls, Heimowitz deliberately cast girls as the ones with technology smarts. In one scene, the characters start to unravel the mystery by figuring out the IP address of a computer used to build an anonymous Web site, which the cyberbully is using to harass the “popular” girl, Skye. “We had some very tech-savvy people help us to make sure that sequence is completely realistic,” Heimowitz explains.

Most teens, she admits, are not quite so conversant with how computers work. Nor are most schools as full of technology as the one on this movie set, where kids move fluidly from a wireless laptop to text messaging on cell phones. The hyped-up technology use is deliberate, Heimowitz says. “We wanted to show an example of girls who can navigate their way around the Internet like any expert in Silicon Valley.” (And she is delighted when audiences pick Adina, “the smart one” of the foursome, as their favorite character.)

When she shows the film, kids often ask her, “Can we really figure out all that stuff?” Heimowitz notes, “That’s one of the things about cyberbullying: Kids don’t realize we can catch the bully. It opens their eyes to the fact that this is not as anonymous as they might think.”

Generating real-time conversations about cyberbullying is one of the best ways to address the problem. Childnet International, based in the United Kingdom, takes a similar approach with its film, Let’s Fight It Together, in which a teen boy is the target of cyberbullying. Both the film and a discussion guide for teachers are available online.

Meanwhile, Heimowitz and her Adina’s Deck crew are about to take on new adventures: Two more films are in the pipeline. One will address online relationships and predators, and the other will focus on plagiarism and cheating. Both will have a detective story line, with the girls from the original film, plus a new boy character, on the case.

Has cyberbullying been an issue at your school? How have you addressed it? Please share your thoughts.

• Suzie Boss’s blog

Today Adina’s Deck was at the YPulse MashUp at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco.

Here is what was covered!

Preventing Cyberbullying in Online Communities for Youth

• Cyberbullying defined
• The impact of cyberbullying on youth communities
• Strategies for prevention

Panelists:
Linda Burch, Chief Education and Strategy Officer, Common Sense Media
Debbie Heimowitz, Founder, Adina’s Deck
Hemanshu Nigam, Chief Security Officer, Fox Interactive Media / MySpace
Denise Restauri, CEO, AllyKatzz

Moderator: Larry Magid, Technology Journalist and Internet Safety Advocate

Special thanks to Anastasia Goodstein & her team for putting together this terrific event and including Adina’s Deck!

We had a great time at the Sacramento film festival where Adina’s Deck was part of the “Young Visionaries” program. The film was screened at the gorgeous Crest theater on K street.

Actresses Amelia Varni “Adina” with Ciera Trussell “Clara and directors Debbie and Jason.

One of the best parts of this festival was being in Ciera’s hometown! Well, almost! This was the closest screening to her house, so her grandmother, family and friends were able to attend.

Adina’s Deck is an official selection for the 2008 Sacramento International Film Festival

We will keep you posted on the screening dates and information.

Thanks so much to Kimmy and Ciera Trussell for their suggestion to submit to Sacramento! We’re excited the film will be screened in “Clara’s” home town!

Thanks so much to Izzy Neis for her shout out to Adina’s Deck on her blog today!  Her blog is a must read for anyone interested in online communities, internet safety, youth media… etc.!! Check it out by clicking here!