Two weeks ago I blogged about, among other things, how VANCE MAJOR retired from fan films only to discover that his 7-year-old son ROYCE MAJOR wanted to make fan films! In fact, here’s one of Royce’s first projects.
Over the years, Vance and I have swapped “dad” stories and compared notes, as my 13-year-old son Jayden is very similar to Royce: Star Trek and sci-fi fans, very into computers, very creative, adorable, and way smarter than their dads (both Vance and I both are totally out of our league when it comes to our kids completely lapping us!). And as I was giving Vance some compliments on Royce’s latest efforts and praising his involvement as a father in encouraging Royce’s passions, I told Vance a little about what Jayden was up to these days.
“Y’know, Jonathan, I’d really like to read a blog about that,” Vance said to me. “I mean, it’s great reading about all these other fan filmmakers and their projects, but Jayden is the ‘next generation,’ and finding out what he’s been doing would be really interesting…to me, at least. You really should write a blog about Jayden and his latest projects.”
Okay, Vance, because you asked for it…!
Like many kids, Jayden has a lot of hobbies and interests. He builds competitive robots and takes karate. We watch Star Trek, Stargate, and other sci-fi together. He spends waaaaaaay too much time viewing YouTube videos, but welcome to Generation Alpha (the next one after Gen Z). He hangs out on Discord in a bunch of special interest group servers (he even has a server of his own), he has his own YouTube Channel, and has friends and followers all over the world (he says that people from other countries are nicer than Americans). And yes, Mommy and I feel completely overwhelmed trying to keep track of and monitor all of this online activity…heaven help us!
Fortunately, Jayden is at his core a “good kid”—kind, empathetic to others, and a bit of a prude. We’ve discussed online privacy and safety with him, and he gets it. Like many parents, we’re crossing our fingers that the genie doesn’t get too far out of the bottle, but eventually you just have to trust that you’ve raised your kid right.
One of the things that completely blows our minds—in addition to the robot-building—is Jayden’s ability to code video games. He creates his projects using the Scratch game engine (developed at MIT for kids) at a level that, frankly, most 13-year-olds aren’t even close to being able to do.
You’ve obviously heard of fan films, but did you know there are also fan GAMES? Jayden, along with possibly hundreds of others, has taken to creating video games based on a 2D online game released in 2015 called Undertale (read more about it here).
Here’s a short segment of one of literally dozens of fan games that Jayden was created based on Undertale…
Continue reading “My SON the FAN FILMMAKER!”