How to get the President’s attention when you’re only 10 years old

Dear President Obama. We know that you’re real busy. But if you could take two minutes to watch our video, we would greatly appreciate it…

You're ten. You and your classmates are going to the White House. You're excited. You're fit 

to burst about all the famous people and places you'll see. 

But the President stands you up. You're so disappointed. Do you meekly accept that 'fiscal 

cuts' cancelled your outing and go home? 

No. If you are the children of Frontier Elementary School in Florida, you make a short but kick-ass scribe video asking Barack Obama to reschedule. 

Their scribe video got them noticed. Big time. As well as getting the attention of the White 

House, it also got them media coverage.9 Quite the political coup! 

It sounds revolutionary - ten-year-olds interacting directly with the President. Yet in one sense, they were doing nothing new. Way before the internet and video sharing sites, way before video itself - in fact, way back before electricity or schools or presidents - humans scribed to one another. 

Let's go back 40,000 years. 

Where to catch the best bison 

You'll find the origins of video scribing in the dark caves of El Castillo, Spain. More than 40,000 years ago, cave paintings shared stories of hunting, ceremony and survival. 

For millennia, people used images to share the secrets of being human and staying alive. First came the cave artists, then came the scribes - an educated few using a stylus tool to document history with images, and eventually, words. Soon no respectable king, council or religion was without one. 

Pressed by printing 

While text is a comparatively recent invention, it soon caught on. And with the arrival of the printing press, scribing became a niche market. 

As technology advanced, the printing press turned into the typewriter, which turned into the computer, which birthed the internet, the most prolific tool ever known for spreading knowledge fast and wide. 

The tool that lets ten-year-olds talk with presidents. 

Return of the scribes 

So today's scribes have all this at their fingertips: images, text, speech, the internet and 

thanks to some clever people in the 1880s, video. Put it together and what have you got? Video scribing - a technology that harnesses 40,000 years of human ingenuity. 

Following on from breakthrough campaigns by UPS and the RSA, whiteboard animation 

has become a contemporary form of communication for the world's largest companies on every continent. 

It is used in corporations, classrooms, campaigns and creative studios. 

The stylus may have gone, the quill is now rather passé, but armed with a marker or a 

mouse, video scribing allows you to communicate complex ideas simply and to send those ideas across the world at speed