story and photos by Kayte Deioma
It’s rare to find a venue that can hold the attention of the younger kids in the family and the teenagers at the same time. The Zeum in San Francisco does this brilliantly and mom and dad can get in on the act too. Billed as a multimedia arts and technology museum, Zeum gets everyone’s creative juices flowing with opportunities to learn about video production and animation by creating your own productions from 
scratch using all the professional tools of the trade.
In the Main Gallery, you can get a quick idea how green backgrounds help create special effects in the Special FX area. After choosing an exciting video background like crashing waves or flames, you slide down a green sliding board and watch as the TV screen shows you sliding through the waves or the flames. This can keep little kids occupied for a good long time and give big kids a taste for creating a more elaborate production they can take home.
Video Production
The rest of the Main Gallery has the components of a live Video Production on one side of the room and basic elements of animation on the other side. To produce a short video you can pick your own starting point. Some people like to get right to the heart of the 
matter by typing a script into the teleprompter, so they know what kind of costumes to look for when they head to wardrobe. Others like to start in the wardrobe department to see what characters they can create and then write them a suitable storyline. There are costumes for young children up to adults, so the whole family can get involved. If you’d like to make a horror film, you can settle into the mask-making department and create your own masks.
No film is complete without its musical soundtrack. You can compose yours in the Sound Lab. You don’t have to be working on a video project to use the Sound Lab. You can also use it to compose a song to perform, or to take home with you.
Once you have your story, wardrobe and soundtrack, you’re ready to choose your background and act out your script on the green background. If there are enough of you, someone can operate the camera and choose the camera angles 
at the Tech Table; otherwise the staff technician will do that for you. For a small donation, your video production will be saved onto a DVD for you to take home.
As you can imagine, creating all those elements can take a while, so you could divide up the tasks and have one person writing the script while another works on the music. Technical advisors are always around with suggestions to get you started.
Animation Stations
On the other side of the Main Gallery are several Animation Stations where you can create
simple animations by moving objects around on a white table and taking photos of them with a camera mounted above or in front of the table. Another station is stocked with plastic dinosaurs and other creatures that you can use to create an animation. All of these animation
projects follow the same principle of using a series of still photographs of objects in different positions to create the impression of motion.
Next door in the Animators Studioyou learn about clay animation. Here again you have an opportunity to create a storyline, choose a pre-constructed set and create your own clay figures to shoot with stop-action video and a computer. You can take the clay figures and the animation DVD you create home with you.
The MetaField Maze
You could spend all day and never leave the primary production areas downstairs, but there’s more to do upstairs. The stairway circles around the Roundabout, where you’ll find the MetaField Maze, a virtual board game projected on the floor. You use your weight to tip the virtual play board and move a marble of light around the maze without letting it fall into a black hole. Tip: It helps to read the directions.
Upstairs
Upstairs you’ll find the Music Production Lab, where you can sing along karaoke-style to your favorite songs 
from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to pop favorites. Again you can don costumes, choose your digital background and take your music video home with you.
The Digital Studio, where you can learn about photo 
manipulation, was closed on our visit, but a Build a ‘Bot Workshop was going on in the classroom next door. Artist and robot inventor Simone Davalos demonstrated how to build a robot that would mix syrup and carbonated water to make soda. Kids and adults were fascinated with her demonstration of computer programming using the process of making a peanut butter sandwich to illustrate how to give a robot instructions.
Outside
The 100-year-old Zeum Carousel, built in 1906 spent time in Seattle, New Mexico and 15 years in Long Beach, CA before returning to San Francisco in 1998. Its giraffes, camels, goats and horses have all been meticulously restored and look like new. One ticket will get you two rides on the merry-go-round.
Outside the main Zeum tower, the Gift Shop offers an interesting variety of creative toys, games and books. The Zeum Café has snacks to feed the budding creative genius. If you’re looking for more of a selection, there are a few other fast food places nearby.
Zeum
221 Fourth Street
(at Howard Street next to the Moscone Center)
San Francisco, CA 94103
(415)820-3320
www.zeum.org
But the signs are easy to spot and they led me into the vast Parking Lot 1, then past the camouflage of uniform-clad soccer teams and bushy trees and up to a big white house with a little round sign near the ground next to the entrance. The contrast between the businesslike exterior and the fantasy that begins as you enter the Kidspace Museum is startling.
building to the ticket booth that juts into the inner courtyard. Beyond the ticket booth, are two distinct worlds. Mothers at courtyard tables sip their mochas from the Nestle Café by Wolfgang Puck. Just feet away, kids in hard hats work together to create structures of giant blocks or PVC pipe and plastic squares as others drive pint size construction vehicles in the Blasting Zone. Steam shoots up from the pavement, reminiscent of the streets of New York, not Pasadena.
Kids can interact and get a bug’s eye view with people-sized bugs and become servers or customers inBugsy’s Diner or get up close and personal with a real bee hive. They can go on an archaeological dig and discover fossils and dinosaur bones, create an earthquake by moving tectonic plates, drive a jeep or climb up and up and up on all kinds of climbing towers. Supervised art and activity stations let them get as messy and creative as they want.
Through the glass doors the Nature Exchange provides hands on opportunities to learn about rocks and fossils. Kids can bring their favorite stones and trade them for different ones.
This area really sets Kidspace apart from most other children’s museums. Immediately behind the Digging Deeper building, is the paved Wisteria Courtyard. On one side is Kirby’s Kid’s Korner, where kids can play on a small playground. Most of the rest of the pavement is covered by the Trike Tracks where kids can race around on solo or tandem trikes. In the Stone Hollow Amphitheater on the hillside above the courtyard, staff present educational and interactive shows with costumed characters if the weather is good. The hillside is landscaped as a miniature version of Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco, with a trickle of a stream running down the rocky hill. TheSpider Web Climber, Bat Cave, and the Strata Cliff Climb rock climbing wall are popular highlights of the outdoor exhibit.
From the central courtyard to the back of the outdoor exhibit, most activities are designed for kids five and up. The Early Childhood Development Center has activities and toys for children four and under in the front building next to the Busy Bee Learning Store. Immediately to the right when you come through the kaleidoscope tunnel is the Nestle Café by Wolfgang Puck. Considering that it is in a museum, the food is reasonably priced, and since it bears the Wolfgang Puck brand, it’s also quite good.
Your first stop should be the Ford Education Center. For an extra charge, you can try out the Wild Adventure Simulator, a virtual reality ride offering movement and sound to create an adventure for your senses. There are a variety of different animated simulations that alternate, so depending on when you visit, you may find yourself saving dinosaurs from extinction, searching for life on the bottom of the ocean or seeing the world through the eyes of birds, bees, tigers and other creatures.
The award-winning Amphibiville is populated with hundreds of amphibians like frogs and salamanders, some living on two acres of outdoor wetlands, and others in recreated environments inside the National Amphibian Conservation Center. The intricately constructed exhibits in the Center are inhabited by creatures from around the world. Some of the indoor habitats are created with glass walls to the outside so you can see what’s going on in the outdoor habitat, even if you’re staying inside out of the rain. Even if it’s not raining outside, it might be raining in the Immersion Gallery where you can walk through a recreated environment that may be experiencing rain or fog.
The Wildlife Interpretive Gallery is housed in the zoo’s oldest building which is 10,000 square feet of interactive displays, wildlife theatre, video and multi-media to draw in visitors for a fun way to learn about the animals and nature. There is also an exhibit hall within that offers rotating exhibits.
The Butterfly Garden offers first hand experience with a wide range of beautiful butterflies from Costa Rica and El Salvador. The Holden Reptile Museum houses the zoo’s reptile collection. The Penguinarium also offers a covered climate-controlled display of a variety of breeds of the ice bound birds.