Activities in our house revolve around theater and music. There’s always a play rehearsal, choir practice, voice lesson, dance class, etc., on our schedules.

A current project for our family revolves around an opera about Lois Lowry’s book, The Giver. The Minnesota Opera and the Kansas City Opera commissioned an opera written for young voices. It’s an ambitious project. The content isn’t easy, nor is the music.

How does this relate to anything techie? The Minnesota Opera is currently doing fundraising for the project. Besides the regular types of fundraising, they are using a newish tool called Kickstarter. Kickstarter is an amazing idea that makes use of social media and grass roots efforts. The point of Kickstarter is to raise a large sum of money by reaching out to people – often people not included in major fundraising efforts. This money will be raised through donations of $10, $25 and $50. The project is spread on social media – via Facebook, word of mouth, etc. The hope is to have projects go viral so lots of people pitch in money for great projects.  (Here’s the Opera’s Kickstarter project. Kick in a few bucks!)

This project even demonstrates the power of visual storytelling. Check out a few of the videos – you get to hear the voices of the kids, the director, the composer, and more. The images, the voices, the music. These all tell the story in a way not possible in just words. To top it off, kids did much of the editing and storyboarding of these videos! (They’re really good, too!)