Clip Tip
Projects
The Clip Tip Projects are a series of video shorts funded by a grant from the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge in 2019 & 2021 that put a twist on social-emotional learning for kids, using humor to tackle some tough topics. Each video is under four minutes and features puppet Xavier Jackson talking with barbers and barbershop guests about issues and concerns affecting him in school and life. Topics include: Accountability; Stress; Anger; Winning & Losing; ADHD; Healthy Choices and Trying New Things.
Meet Clay achee
Clay Achee was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After working in the Louisiana Film Industry for 10 years he started Beyond the Garage LLC and started making puppets and short films/ music videos/ commercials.
During that time the ideas for Ziggy and The Junkyard Band started to develop. In 2018 he launched a youtube channel to develop the idea. In 2020 he teamed up with LPB to produce Ziggy’s Arts Adventure.
Clip Tips 1 are a series of video shorts created by creative visionary Clay Achee, as a project funded by the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge in 2019. The project was created to creatively address kid-centered concerns using humor and relatable mentors.
Each clip provides tips to strengthen social emotional resiliency and well-being while digging into topics from Anger, Fairness, School Success, Healthy Choices, and Mental Health Stigmas. Each tip follows the same format – with Xavier a puppet being dropped off at O’Neil’s Barbershop by his uncle Action Jackson for a haircut.
While at the barbershop Xavier shares his frustrations with barbers and peers who talk with him providing advice and strategies on how to approach each issue.
Clip Tips was inspired by the creative vision of Sesame Street, which celebrates its 50th year in 2019. This program was groundbreaking at its time for using puppets within an urban landscape and regular, relatable people to tackle issues that children face.
Clip Tips was launched to support our belief that change best happens when people put aside their fears and look at issues from a whole new angle.
Line4Line believes that regular people are the best mentors and that everyone has a story to share that can help others navigate life. Our goal is to support our youth from within and to change the narrative around future success and potential for our city’s Black males.
The Clip Tip Project was dreamed up by Museum Educator and Line4Line co-founder Lucy Perera to put a twist on how we face social, mental, academic, and health resiliency. Working with puppeteer, film guru, musician, and self-proclaimed rabble-rouser Clay Achee from Ziggy and the Junkyard Band and Beyond the Garage, Perera and Line4Line founder O’Neil Curtis devised a plan to create an education series geared to kids that breaks down tough topics using humor while using safe community-based barbershop as the environment.
In the early summer of 2019, the team finalized topics they wanted to cover, and then Achee began work on writing scripts and casting his crew of creatives and techs. Achee also designed and sewed the puppet Xavier. In the fall of 2019, over a series of two days, the group came together to film the 5 shorts. Using O’Neil’s Barbershop and a local community park as locations, the videos feature barbers/mentors O’Neil Curtis, Keith Davis (JimiJump), poet Xero Skidmore, and Curtis’s daughter O’Nya.
