About OxCart Productions

OxCart is a home-based production company started in the spring of 2004 by Helen Stub and Lyn Lacy, retired Minneapolis public school media specialists with over 60 years combined experience working with classroom teachers, children and young people.

OxCart is committed to interdisciplinary, high-quality programs that encourage life-long learning. Our productions use on-site original and secondary sources. Each program has been field-tested successfully to meet language arts and social studies standards for elementary, middle and secondary students.

OxCart titles are featured also in programs at libraries, churches, historical societies and senior citizen centers.

Helen and Lyn have been writers and producers of educational audiovisual materials since the 1980s when Helen Ryberg and Helen Stub founded Heritage Productions, Inc.

Heritage produced biographies and histories in sound filmstrip and VHS video format. Also produced were narrated slide presentations of anniversaries and special events based on family history research and oral interviews. Lyn wrote scripts and recorded voice-overs for many of the Heritage productions, two of which won awards from the Minnesota Educational Media Organization (MEMO).

A chance conversation in the winter of 2004 led Lyn and Helen Stub to start-up the company again under the name OxCart Productions. They realized they shared a dream to revisit the valuable research they had gathered over the years, to add to that research, and to enhance the programs by producing them in exciting new formats. They decided to begin again in memory of their friend and co-worker, Helen Ryberg.

Lyn also creates new DVD programs to add to OxCart’s collection, such as an adaptation of Alma Scott’s The Wily Woodchucks, illustrated by Flavia Gág, which is a picture book about the Gág family at home in New Jersey.

Helen has a hand in the logistics of creating the new company. She is also creating new projects, such as an educational board game about the Santa Fe Trail – a trading route that was the precursor to Oregon Trail – as well as DVD productions of historic American trails.

For OxCart’s DVDs, Lyn uses a Mac G5 to digitally enhance pictures and add color, new music and updated video footage to the filmstrips and videos produced by Heritage in the 1980s. Software applications are Word X, Photoshop Elements 2.0, Final Cut Express 2, Toast 6 Titanium, and Photo To Movie 3.1. Note from Lyn: since many of the productions have line drawings, it is necessary to put a Gaussian blur on the DVDs for viewing on televisions rather than computer monitors or large-screen digital projectors.

Lyn Lacy and Helen Stub
Partners in OxCart Productions