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Barbara Zimmerman, professor of film theory in Ithaca, N.Y., recently described the Bay Area as a “media paradise.” All that flickers and streams and pixilates is in our town, and the East Bay Media Center has begun its annual Summer Media Camp to de-mystify the tools for young people in this virtual Eden. 

Students from area schools gathered last week at the EBMC facility in downtown Berkeley to begin a three-week introduction to video production. In 15 days the 11- to 17-year-olds will brainstorm, write, storyboard, shoot, and edit video works. 

Most of the students have never handled a video camera before, and probably couldn’t tell you what “diagetic” means. (Barbara Zimmerman could, but it would take her 15 minutes to do so.) 

But after thousands of hours of watching television, and hundreds of movies logged in their young minds, the kids have an intuitive knowledge of how film and television programming work. 

“They are much more aware than they cognitively know,” said Lowell Rojon, who has been working in video since 1976 and is one of three instructors at the camp. 

He likened the camp to pulling the curtain away from the Wizard of Oz, such that the students can better participate in this media paradise once the tools of illusion are plainly laid out to see. 

They watched an Eggo Waffle commercial and a short video parody of a Film Noir detective flick, “Dick Jones: Private Detective,” to analyze their production elements and communication techniques. Once the kids overcome their mumbling and fidgeting, they easily recognize camera angles and editing patterns. 

Ikuko Sato, another instructor at the Media Camp and student of film at the California College of Arts and Crafts, said part of her job is to not tell the kids how films are made. She intends to draw out what they already know. 

Kelsey Gustafon, a 14-year-old incoming freshman at Berkeley High, said she had used video previously for a science project, for which she drew by hand a sequence of images to be shot with the camera. At the camp she learned what she had instinctively done is called “storyboarding.” 

No one expects the kids to become professional filmmakers, but Paul Kealoha-Blake, co-founder of the EBMC, points to the statistic of most homes having a minimum of two screens: a television and a computer. He said he designed the Summer Media Camp to give children a better understanding of media through making it. 

Eileen Crean, Kelsey’s mother, said she has been creating family videos with a digital camera and iMac editing software she recently purchased. If Kelsey takes some initiative with the camera, Crean wishfully hopes, she might be pulled her away from her primary hobby of talking endlessly with her friends on the telephone. 

In the EBMC facility, the kids broke up into groups to brainstorm their projects. What to do? Sato makes a hopeful suggestion of documentary-style narrative. Rojon offers the idea of making abstract work. The kids’ eyes sort of glaze over. 

The instructors are gently nudging the kids to consider forging new ways of telling stories, breaking out of usual patterns – which is all in accordance with the EBMC’s overarching advocacy of independent, alternative media practices. 

But among the young students there is little interest in breaking any sort of pattern. The two brainstorming groups consist of the girls on one side of the room, the boys on the other. They talk and laugh and write notes and come up with the stories they are going to spend the next two and a half weeks focused on. 

The boys will make a parody of the action film “The Matrix,” wherein the nemeses of Neo are evil tax agents, and the trick special effects will be cheapened for comic potential. In true action film production style, the script and the storyboard are being created simultaneously. 

The girls have ambitiously embarked on three projects: a television commercial, a music video, and an episode of the sitcom “Friends.” Dawn Ocampo, 17 and an incoming senior at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward, said they chose to make an episode of “Friends” (which they are calling “Buddies”) because they like the show, and intend to faithfully recreate the program with the same characters and the same relationships. 

In two more weeks, the final tapes will done and dubbed. The next Summer Media Camp begins in July. For information, call the East Bay Media Center at 843-3699.