Picture This: Visual Mail for Pen Pals : Entrepreneur Uses Home Video to Add a Special, Personal Touch to an Old-Fashioned Practice
If the Soviets continue to line up for Big Macs and fries, can home videos be far behind?
Rich Ray believes the Soviet Union is ready for a new form of communication: VideoPals. Instead of sending your pal a letter, you send a home video.
“I thought it would be great to use home video for more than home movies,” said Ray, the 30-year-old owner of Array Communications in Orange, a firm that produces corporate videos. “It adds another dimension to pen pals, so the people can see each other and introduce their family and friends.”
Ray launched VideoPals in January as a nonprofit corporation and has attracted individuals and classrooms of students who want to send video greetings throughout the world. (Individual registration and match-ups for Video Pals cost $29.95; schools pay $96 for an unlimited number of students.) He’s negotiating with a video camera company to include information about VideoPals with its packaging and is asking video and electronic store owners to carry flyers about the new service.
VideoPals will be matched according to various categories: age, sex, language, interests, geography.
“Some people have called wanting a love relationship,” Ray said, “but I’ve explained that I am not a matchmaker or a dating service. If, eventually, VideoPals meet and end up getting married, that would be fantastic. But that’s not what we’re about.”
Ray expects to have 400 adults and schoolchildren signed up as VideoPals by the end of the month. He already has paired several classes of schoolchildren in California, New York, Florida and Sweden.
“Really what this is all about is bringing the world closer together, promoting friendship and understanding around the world,” Ray said. “I’ve contacted consulates here--that’s how we got the pair-up with two Swedish schools, through the consulate in Los Angeles--and have written to the governments of the Eastern Bloc countries. I’m really excited about what’s going on in Eastern Europe.”
Judging from the public’s response to International Pen Friends, a for-profit, letter-writing organization, Ray should gear up for an onslaught of prospective VideoPals. IPF membership--250,000 people from 153 countries--has almost doubled in the last few years. In addition to letters, it is common for members to send audiocassettes to each other, according to IPF representative Leslie Fox of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Through audiocassettes, said Fox, “a person is more real to them and they can talk for hours on end.” IPF’s most popular pen-friend country is the Soviet Union, Fox said, explaining that the group began to have correspondents there a year ago.
IPF, whose members range in age from 8 to 89, charges a one-time fee for members, entitling each to a list of 10 to 16 names. Fees range according to age: 8-14, $9; 15-20, $13; 21-60, $17; 61 and older, $13.
Ray said he got the idea for VideoPals a few years ago when he was taking a video class as part of his graduate studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “We were studying all different uses of video, for real estate and product demonstration, interactive video to train people. I thought, ‘Why not communicate with home video so people can really get to know each other, see each other.’
“I don’t think it takes away from writing,” he added. “It enhances it. I’m a writer myself, so I’m not against writing. I don’t think it takes away from imagination. There’s a difference between imagination and reality. This is a real intimate form of communication. You can really get to know a person through video.”
Ray is matching classrooms for the 1990-91 school year, but will accept “about 25 more pilot programs for this semester.”
Local schools participating are Mission Viejo High School, matched with students from Ostra Funkaboskolan in Kalmar, Sweden, and Serrano Intermediate School in El Toro with Fox Lane Middle School in Bedford, N.Y.
“We haven’t had any face-to-face contact yet, but we’re working on storyboards for the video right now,” said Laurie Kund, adviser and teacher of the international studies program at Mission Viejo High. The ninth-graders in the Model U.N. program are VideoPals of the Swedish students.
“They’re really excited,” Kund said of her students. “They’re preparing a package to send before the video, with souvenirs from Mission Viejo and California. For the video, they plan to start with the school, taking a tour of the campus farm, library and the performing arts center and then introduce themselves.
“They took a poll of other ninth-graders to see where they like to spend their time, so they can show the (Swedish) students those places,” Kund said. “They like Carl’s Jr., the beach at Dana Point, the Model U.N. room, the Mission Viejo Mall. They plan to end with questions for the Swedish kids. Things like: ‘Do you have malls, too? Did you ever have a hamburger? “
Kund said that she views the educational VideoPals program as “another dimension for them to get involved with communications. It’s not to discount writing and reading. They do a lot of that. But things are getting more and more visual. This is the ‘90s style of communication.”
VideoPal s : within California, call (714) 997-8121; outside the state, (800) VID-PALS.
