Kid Safe Online Videos!

While surfing, I found several references to “light painting” and took a peek. It’s really cool and people have been really creative with it. Below, I have posted links to 5 different videos on the subject available on YouTube.

The site: YouTube. A public site that lets anyone sign up and upload video content. Note that *anyone* can post *anything* on this site. There are suggested other videos to the right of the selected video, and while the suggested ones are usually of the same topic, it’s not guaranteed. Also note that people can make comments on the video, and they are not moderated, so any and all matter of language can show up. After the video plays, there is another set of suggested videos – again, while usually on the exact same topic, be aware that anything can show up. In short, YouTube isn’t the place to just let your kids go and watch things – it’s be too easy for them to click on something that looks cool, but turns out to be a video response rant. An easy way to mitigate the possible exposure is to click on the “Full Screen” button before starting it. It looks like this:

When you’re done, just hit your “esc” button.

The subject: Light Painting!

These are really cool to watch and get a “howdidtheydoothat?” reaction. First, here are a few that I watched and were OK to me (caution, don’t just click willy-nilly on all the light painting videos; in some of, them people spell “bad” words and use cigarettes as light sources).

#1: Light Painting With The Kids
A dad’s account on having fun learning this with the kids.
Length: 3:28
Concerns: due to the lighting and how some faces were captured, this may look spooky to some children, or just be hilarious to others.

#2: Saving Energy Commercial – how much 24 cents of electricity gets you
Inventive use of the new fad – informative too!
Concerns: it *is* a commercial… but it’s not really “selling” anything. It’s just cool to watch.

#3: Light painting animation

Someone had a lot of fun using light painting in a stop-motion way.
Concerns: hip-hop type music is used – this in and of itself is not a concern, but this genre tends to have a higher concentration of adult language so I didn’t want anyone put off when it started. As far as I could tell, I couldn’t hear any.

#4: Playground
This is a lot of fun – watch the light blob go out and have fun at the playground .

#5: Lightpainting tutorial
I watched a couple tutorials on how to make your own light painting and I liked this one the best for it’s step-by-step and the fact that it didn’t use any questionable images.

Have fun!