© 2010 YouSendIt. All rights reserved.

Case Study

ZeumZeum: San Francisco’s Children’s Museum is a hands-on, multimedia arts and technology museum for kids. The museum’s Animators Studio enables youth to produce clay animation (stop-motion animation of clay figures) movies, videos and music, with the kids taking on roles as creators, animators, performers and designers. Once completed, these animations, created during school field trips, are provided to the students as well as teachers.

The Problems

• DVDs of the clay animation movies created by the kids were expensive and each required 10-15 minutes to burn.

• Time restrictions were causing back-ups at the museum’s Animators Studio exhibit.

• DVDs were difficult to share and were not environmentally friendly.

The soluTion

YouSendIt Corporate SuiteYouSendIt donated its Corporate Suite solution to Zeum, allowing the museum to eliminate costly and time-consuming transfers of productions to DVDs. Instead, staff could create digital files for video and music productions and easily distribute them to parents and teachers via YouSendIt.

Situation and ChallengesZeum: San Francisco’s Children’s Museum nurtures the Three Cs of 21st-century literacy — Creativity, Collaboration and Communication — among youth and families. By combining clay animation, music video production, live performance and digital art with imagination, Zeum’s visitors become creators, animators, directors, performers and designers. Visitors flock to Zeum every day for general admissions, camps and birthday parties. The museum also hosts as many as three or four visiting field trips daily. One of Zeum’s most popular exhibits is the Animators Studio, which enables youth to produce clay animation movies as modelers, directors and animators. Upon completion of their clay animation movies, the students are given a copy of their final productions to take home and share with friends and family. Zeum had spent 10-15 minutes to burn productions onto one DVD, with each DVD costing $1.60, including envelopes and color labels. With approximately 10 video productions created for each field-trip class burning discs became very expensive and time consuming, causing delays that tied up the entire Animators Studio exhibit.

SolutionZeum IT Manager Mark Hellar wanted to transition from burning DVDs and move towards a method of digital distribution for field trips. The challenge was that the files were very large and the nonprofit museum had little in the way of bandwidth or servers. DVDs were difficult to share and also were not environmentally friendly. Hellar had used YouSendIt in the past and felt it would be the perfect solution because of its security and easy use. And since YouSendIt resides on the Web, the museum would not need to buy any equipment or upgrade its infrastructure to use the service. Hellar contacted YouSendIt and told the company about the clay animation movies that students were creating at Zeum. In response, YouSendIt donated its Corporate Suite to Zeum, which was quickly implemented, replacing DVD burning at the Animators Studio exhibit.Zeum began by using YouSendIt to send files of the clay animation movies from the Animators Studio. Next, Hellar plans to expand the use of YouSendIt to distribute the projects from Zeum’s Video Production exhibit and Music Production Lab.

Zeum: San Francisco’s Children’s MuseumNon-profit OrganizationMultimedia Arts & Technology Children’s Museum Uses YouSendIt for Sharing Clay Animation Projects san francisco’s

children’s museum

© 2010 YouSendIt. All rights reserved.

Case Study

“ As a nonprofit

organization, tracking

budget and cutting costs

are always top of mind.

YouSendIt has not only

enabled us to expand

our infrastructure from

an IT standpoint, but it

has benefited the entire

museum by enabling

our education staff to

operate more efficiently

and helping to cut costs

without detracting from the

children’s experience. ”Mark HellarIT Manager,

Zeum

ResultsYouSendIt has freed up considerable time for Zeum staff and significantly slashed the cost of distributing its clay animation projects. The creative work can now be sent securely via YouSendIt to individual parents and students or to teachers as a folder containing several production files. By sending the videos to e-mail addresses belonging to parents or teachers, Zeum knows that only approved recipients obtain the videos of the children.Additionally, the files upload quickly, accelerating the process for museum staff.“We get 5,000 visitors per month through our doors,” notes Hellar, “and YouSendIt has enabled us to speed the flow of our museum, creating happy families and happy kids.”

YouSendIt, Inc.1919 S.Bascom Ave., 3rd Floor Campbell, CA 95008866.55U.SENDsales@yousendit.com www.yousendit.com

Zeum: San Francisco’s Children’s MuseumNon-profit OrganizationMultimedia Arts & Technology Children’s Museum Uses YouSendIt for Sharing Clay Animation Projects san francisco’s

children’s museum