KidTeens!
Brooklyn Young Filmmakers goal is to create a low cost, intergenerational, filmmaking minor league, where Brooklyn teens (14 – 22 yrs) and adults can get a firsthand introduction to the diverse careers in the film industry, by actually being put to work in specific job roles on short narrative films with emerging independent filmmakers who head the camera and lighting departments. We will equip our students with the knowhow to be the best unpaid Production Assistants ever on a set, and give them the opportunity to network with our emerging filmmaker crew/teachers, who may later recruit our students for their own shoots, which can lead to paid work.
With this production model, we will be able to scout the few who might have the raw talent, problem solving personalities, and stubborn stick-to-it-ness, necessary to forge a freelance career in Film/TV/Commercials. Then provide them with personal mentors, who can coach and steady them, while they perfect their basic skills, and start building their own personal job referral networks for leads to paid work.
Before the Steiner Movie Studios opened in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 2004, Brooklyn Young Filmmakers produced two public forums (at LIU and A.R.T. New York), to discuss ways of establishing a filmmaking training district to prepare working class residents to be part of the filmmaking growth that was coming. From 2005- 2007, Brooklyn Young Filmmakers produced Careers In Film Seminars at Long Island University, featuring panels of union level film professionals from diverse crafts. Then Brooklyn Young Filmmakers became a producer of low budget short films. From 2008 – 2011 we have produced seven short narrative films, developing the MAKE A FILM Class Series, which we offer in collaboration with the New York City College of Technology’s Division of Continuing Education.
Brooklyn Young Filmmakers unique three class (75hrs) MAKE A FILM Series is our core teaching and shoot organizing structure. While developing our curriculum and concepts (i.e. Community Casting Call and Scavenger Hunt for shoot resources), we have also been building a stable of student crew/volunteers, emerging filmmakers, and professional film consultants who can assist us with taking our learning model to the larger Brooklyn community.
Brooklyn Young Filmmakers, from 2005-2009, had an in-kind office in the Whitman Community Center in Fort Greene public housing until the center closed. We were based in the Whitman Center when we produced our first three films, and involved public housing residents in the films as both actors and crew. The BYFC Director/Founder, Trayce Gardner created a program that is grounded in the lessons she learned in her first career in counseling and community outreach and organizing in California, where she worked at a rape crisis center, a shelter for battered women, and started and ran for three years a family violence prevention program for men and couples on court referral for violence. From her firsthand knowledge of working with people who have been traumatized by basic living situations (and that extends to economic survival and family history), she has shape the MAKE A FILM Class Series into a boot camp that also helps our students:
1) Improve upon their self-images and ability to pitch themselves
2) Learn how to enjoy working with others from diverse backgrounds 3) Get excited about improving their communication and literacy skills
4) Be part of informed discussions about problems and issues that are close to home
5) Believe that they also have the right to envision what has yet to be
A secondary goal of our KidTeens Community Filmmaking Project is to attract foot traffic from the surrounding affluent areas into the campus of public housing for educational seminars and creative collaborations. In the Scriptwriting class KidTeens will be required to:
1) Incorporate a specific art discipline into their short scripts (example: if dance is the discipline, it can be that a character is a dancer, or sees a dance performance take place, or a dance number reflecting the spirit of the story can be putting in closing credits)
2) Select two social or cultural issues (from a long list of topics); do research on them; and work them into their stories.
Brooklyn Young Filmmakers will invite professionals who represent both the art discipline and social issues in our scripts, to make presentations and be consultants on both the film shoot and with the development of Discussion Guides that will go with the completed films.
In our first year of the KidTeens Community Filmmaking Project, Brooklyn Young Filmmakers will invite young adults and educators from across the borough to audit classes, audition for casting calls, and be general production assistants on the two film narrative film shoots in FY 2011 – 2012. The Brooklyn Public Library Young Adult Services has agreed to assist Brooklyn Young Filmmakers with borough-wide outreach through the Libraries. The Directors of the Farragut and Ingersol Centers have agreed to help us with outreach to the other Brooklyn NYCHA community centers that are part of the Cornerstone program.
In the second year of the KidTeens program, we hope to be able to start a new community filmmaking project in another district. All across Brooklyn there are neighborhood organizations, schools, churches, and residents, that are already doing small media projects, shooting documentaries, PSAs, and music videos. There are also teachers running poetry and prose writing projects. Brooklyn Young Filmmakers ultimate goal is to help neighborhood groups combine and reshape their existing resources into lead-ins to the film industry.
Brooklyn Young Filmmakers has been able to accomplish all it has to date with no paid staff. The BYFC Director receives a small instructor’s fee for the classes we offer through the Continuing Ed. We have received Regrants from the Brooklyn Arts Council for almost every year since 2001, which have helped us develop our training materials and produce our films. We have received numerous small grants from other funders, including from Council Member Letitia James. This year we were awarded our first grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Our biggest asset though has been the hundreds of thousands of dollars of in-kinds contributed to Brooklyn Young Filmmakers, including space, shoot materials, and volunteer and consultant time.
Brooklyn Young Filmmakers is laying the groundwork for the KidTeens Community Filmmaking Project, while submitting proposals for funding. Our current Spring/Summer 2011 adult MAKE A FILM Class Series is preparing to produce “MY FAMILIA”, a story that is relevant to both teens and their families. From July – August, we will be doing pre-production (including creating a set) and the shoot, at the Farragut Community Center. We will be recruiting our first KidTeens to be involved in the cast and crew. The art discipline we have incorporated into the project is skateboarding. We are currently outreaching to local pro skateboarders to set up demos of their art in June at the Farragut and Ingersol Community Centers to help us with recruiting KidTeens.
We are very excited about a grant we received from the Brooklyn Arts Council that will enable us by early May to transform our new word press website www.wearebyfc.org into a resource for:
1) Free online lessons and information about filmmaking resources and training
2) Promoting the availability of our students. and the emerging filmmakers we work with, for internships and paid work
3) Outreach for support (both consultant and financial) from businesses and individuals in the film industry
4) Grassroots fundraising opportunities (i.e. using the fundraising site www.kickstarter.com for specific film projects, and selling of BYFC Teaching Story DVDs with Discussion Guides).
Brooklyn Young Filmmakers already has the possibility of being paid to take it KidTeens Community Filmmaking Project to another borough. The Queens Public Library requested a proposal from Brooklyn Young Filmmakers, which it has submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts for grant money it was invited to apply for.