“Papa! Papa! Papa!”…cried my 6 year old’s voice in earnest from the living room one Saturday morning. “You have soooo got to come and see this!” He yelled as he came bounding into our bedroom. “It is sooo cool! The shark is going to eat the boy while the others fight it off with spears!” Emerging from my Saturday morning slumber I had to shake my head a bit to see if I had heard him right… “Hmmm what?…Shark?…Jaws?…Little boy?…Spears?… Oh man…what has he wandered into on the TV…”
As I left the bedroom and rounded the corner into the living room it all became clear…sure enough, there on the television was the image of a young boy, being eaten by a shark as a dad and two older boys, around my son’s age, fought the shark off with spears… so, yep our son was right, that was what the picture was of…but was it real…well not exactly.
As a family we believe in limits on television and screen time. Hence, Saturday morning is one of those special times in the week when our son is allowed to indulge. Unfortunately, the era of wholesome Saturday morning cartoons from my childhood seems to have disappeared and, since we live overseas, streaming services are our main recourse of “televised” entertainment. With that being said, we do have some guardrails in place to manage the “rabbit hole” of streaming platforms like YouTube. Whatever he watches should be wholesome, educational (admittedly, this is a of a bit of a subjective qualifier ?), age appropriate and provide positive messaging. One of our son’s favorites programs (and mine too) is a YouTube series called “Outdoor Boys” which chronicles the outdoor fishing, camping, and bush-crafting adventures of a father and his sons. Given the plethora of…well…”trash” for lack of a better term… that is out there, it is one of the few YouTube channels geared to kids that is worthwhile, good humored and family friendly.
Anyhow…like many YouTube programs, “Outdoor Boys” episode cover images often consist of some outlandish depiction of the main tag line of the program and in this case, it revolved around chronicling some of their more humorous videos and memes from the past five years. “Oh My!!” I said as I feigned a bit of surprise at the image… “I hope they save him!” “I know! Right?” said my son, wide eyed…it was at that point that I felt it best to inform him that there was nothing to worry about…while the image showed one thing, it certainly wasn’t real, but rather was a composite…maybe done with a green screen and photoshop.
“Huh?” Replied my son
“What’s a composite?”
“What’s photoshop?”
“What’s a green screen?”
This of course led to a circular discussion and explanation of these terms and others, the gist of which was him concluding that images like this were something “Papa and him” could also make…or at least try to.
Although I don’t have a dedicated green screen, we do work at a school with large rolls of colored paper, so I figured that might work. For the next week, some of the first words out of our son’s mouth when we would get home from school were “Did you remember to get the paper” To which my wife and I took turns replying…
“Soon…”
“By the end of the week…”
“Tomorrow…”
And eventually, “Yes…we got it…”
Once the weekend rolled around the paper couldn’t go up fast enough. Our son already had a hodgepodge of ideas for the different kinds of pictures he wanted to create…
“Can you make me riding a snowflake and swinging a lasso?”
“Can you make me jumping out of the way of a shark?”
“Can you make me holding my breath underwater while standing on the ocean floor?”
“Sure” I replied to one and all… not exactly knowing what I might be getting myself into.
This led to a quick series of him posing and actively hamming it up for the camera and the rest…well that was up to me.
Once I had the raw images it was time to see what I could come up with. While I do have some experience with photoshop and compositing (I had done some as a part of one of my MFA graduate courses at SCAD) there is always a learning curve, but never fear…Google and YouTube are always there to help fill in the gaps…
I decided to start with what I figured would be the most straight forward of the ideas…holding his breath while standing on the ocean floor. After a couple hours off and on of sorting through stock imagery, experimenting, tweaking, Googling, watching a tutorial or two (or three…or four…) and playing around with it I came up with a version I was happy with before moving onto some other poses and options (I didn’t do the leap from a sharks mouth, but went with a dash away from a cheetah…).
Here’s the thing… when my son first asked if we could make pictures like this, I had a bunch of little voices in my head coming up with excuses not to do it. There were all kinds of reasons why, but I ignored them, put on a confident face and declared… “Let’s go for it!” And we did. In the end, were the images perfect? Nope, not by a long shot… but… did my son enjoy coming up with ideas and have fun posing for them? Most definitely! Did I enjoy making them and seeing my son use his imagination and be creative? Of course! Did I feel thankful to have the opportunity to bring them to life for him, especially when I saw the joy on his face when I showed him the final versions? Yeah, U Betchya! You see… the thing is… the end product doesn’t have to be perfect…that is ok… as creatives we can be our own worst critics. We see the faults that others do not. What we can’t do though is let fear of it not being “perfect” become a barrier.
My point here, is that often it can be easy to get swept up in the our own lives… to think we either don’t have the time or the skills for something, yet our children often view us as being able to do anything. We embody superheroes in their eyes, and, like Uncle Ben said… “With great power comes great responsibility”. This responsibility weighs on us, to the point that we may avoid doing things or trying things for fear of failing. We don’t want to let others down, especially our kids… and therefore, at least in our mind, the easiest way to not do so is to not try. I mean after all… one can’t lose the game if one doesn’t play the game, right? So, it can become really, really, easy to provide excuses… we don’t have time… we don’t know how… we don’t have the right tools, equipment, facilities, space etc. It is very easy to come up with a whole bunch of reasons not to.
One of the best pieces of advice though that I ever came across, has stuck with me, and helped me counter these excuses and completely changed my outlook (especially as a parent) is this…when we say, we “don’t have time” what we are really saying is “it isn’t important to me.” Think about that…if something is important to you, you will find time to make it happen. Time is elastic in this way. It flexes to accommodate those things we deem important, and it contracts to exclude those things we deem trivial, whether we think of them this way consciously or not.
And so…the next time someone asks you to try something or participate in something… in your mind, change out “I don’t have time” to “It’s not important to me.” How does that make you feel when you think of it like that? Would you be ok saying that to them? Because, even if you don’t actually say it… that is what you mean and what they hear. Is that what you really want to be telling your spouse, child, family member, friend, or co-worker? What are we modeling for others, especially our children, around important life lessons like taking risks and not being afraid to fail or struggle.
The next time your son or daughter asks about building that fort…making that model… designing that crazy invention or drawing that picture with them…go for it…the responsibility that comes with the great power of being their role model and super hero lies not in the outcome of the final product, but rather the responsibility to demonstrate to them the power of taking risks, being creative, overcoming obstacles and not being afraid to fail and learn. Most important of all though… it tells them that they are important to you. I would encourage you to be mindful of this…give it a go…and don’t forget to maybe bring home some green paper. Adventure and imagination await.
