A Retired Sailors Documentary Helped Change Younger Filmmakers’ Lives

By Vanessa Infanzon, Next Avenue

In 2001, a YMCA in Brooklyn employed a husband-and-wife staff of tv producers, Stephanie Walter and John Williams, to assist 15 highschool college students pull collectively a movie about retired seamen dwelling on the YMCA’s residential facility.

The category’s ultimate venture, a one-hour documentary referred to as “Sea Story,” was so properly finished that WNET, the PBS
Invesco Dynamic Media ETF
station in New York, broadcast it.

“The sailors had been very fascinating,” Williams says, “however Stephanie and I discovered the scholars to be extra fascinating.”

Walter and Williams requested the YMCA if they may recruit college students for an additional filmmaking class. This time, they modified the main target: Let the scholars inform their tales. Eight college students participated in 2002; they had been challenged to make a movie about their life.

“We discovered it very thrilling,” Williams says. “It was one thing we hadn’t finished, however we had been actually good at it. It felt like a calling.”

The couple in 2002 based Reel Works, a nonprofit group to create filmmaking alternatives for younger folks in New York Metropolis. Its mission: “Reel Works mentors, conjures up and empowers underserved NYC youth to share their tales by way of filmmaking, making a springboard to profitable careers in media and past.”

That first 12 months, college students produced a number of movies, two of which had been broadcast on the HBO program “30 by 30 Kid Flicks.” “We did not know we had been doing something revolutionary,” says Williams, cofounder and CEO of Reel Works. “We had some fashions by folks we admired, however we had no actual grounding in media or training.”

Opening Credit

Reel Works nearly shut down in 2002 as a result of the 9/11 terror assaults and the beginning of the recession prevented the YMCA from funding the following class. HBO stepped in and provided $20,000 in seed cash for an HBO Younger Filmmakers Lab. “It was extra money than we may think about,” Williams says. “They had been curious about funding a youth media program based mostly on the work we had finished.”

Within the new class, Walter and Williams developed core components of Reel Works: Every scholar makes their very own film, college students select the story they wish to inform in a documentary format and is supplied with one-on-one grownup mentoring from trade professionals.

“These core important concepts by no means modified,” Williams says, “which is about respecting younger voices . . . after which letting them make these wonderful motion pictures.”

At first, the category served 50 college students a 12 months. Walter and Williams, not having a background in training or youth improvement, realized the way to train by way of trial and error and by listening to the scholars.

“As extra colleges wished to ship youngsters to our program and children wished extra courses, little by little, we had been in a position to broaden this system,” he says. “Right now we serve 1,500 younger folks throughout New York Metropolis yearly.”

Display screen Course

college students apply and interview to be admitted to in-school and after-school Reel Works courses in elementary, center and excessive colleges throughout New York. Reel Works additionally gives Movie Faculty Fridays, the place college students are tutored in filmmaking and screenwriting with out having to formally apply.

Class subjects vary from documentary making and stop-motion animation to broadcasting and video podcasting. Skilled filmmakers train project-driven workshops. College students are anticipated to provide an authentic movie associated to the workshop’s medium.

Rising ninth- and Tenth-grade highschool college students sometimes be a part of the after-school program to discover ways to produce a documentary story. “It is often one thing very private and highlights the life they stay,” says Walter, who’s the chief program officer in addition to a cofounder of Reel Works. “They find yourself studying the way to inform tales by way of totally different methodologies. They be taught to shoot, interview and edit.”

College students might proceed by way of Documentary Lab, Narrative Lab after which Narrative Fellows, probably the most superior observe. College students select from amongst cinematography, directing, enhancing, producing and screenwriting. They dig deeply into one particular observe for about eight months, working with mentors from the trade, Walter says.

Every year, some movies produced by college students are submitted to movie festivals. Many have obtained awards from festivals world wide. Funding from firms reminiscent of NBC Common, Netflix, Paramount World and Warner Brothers Discovery maintain these applications free for the scholars.

Shut-Up

From the beginning, Reel Works wished to serve college students from all backgrounds. It turned central to the group’s imaginative and prescient: Change the storytellers, change the world. “That is an enormous dialog at Reel Works,” Walter says. “What’s fairness and inclusion? We all know that we wish to create a really protected artistic area for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and other people of shade) and queer youngsters.”

When Walter met a scholar with a developmental dysfunction, she puzzled who else they might be serving.

“There’s a spot for everybody to be artistic,” she says. “I do know that, as a child with ADHD, if somebody had recognized me earlier, I’d have gotten began earlier in my profession. There’s a spot for all of us who need it.”

Reel Works situated funding and launched Supported Lab, a category for college students with disabilities reminiscent of autism. “They’re so artistic,” Walter says. “The best way they see the world; the best way they examine the world. The best way they’re a part of the world is so compelling and exquisite. I’m at all times blown away.”

Focus

Pupil voices are central to Reel Works; profound and wealthy tales are being informed about numerous points, together with household struggles, psychological well being, racism and relationships.

Nigerian-born Femi Aguaze, a latest Reel Works Narrative Fellow, realized of the nonprofit from a buddy. He heard different college students’ tales — a lot of which resonated with him. “These unseen battles that lots of people undergo are what come by way of Reel Works,” says 25-year-old Aguaze. “There are extra layers (to folks), and also you be taught in regards to the struggles they’d rising up.”

The mentoring and coaching by way of Reel Works are resulting in systemic change — extra people who find themselves Black, brown, disabled, queer or converse English as a second language are becoming a member of the movie trade. Since 2019, 535 Reel Works college students discovered employment in media, in accordance with MediaMKRS, a video manufacturing firm related to Reel Works.

With 441,000 people working within the movie trade, change might take time. In line with the newest College of California, Los Angeles Hollywood Diversity Report, Black, Indigenous and other people of shade directed 23% of the highest theatrical movies in 2023. That’s up from 17% in 2022. Black, Indigenous and other people of shade made up 22% of writers in 2023, in contrast with 12% in 2022.

“Reel Works is offering a supportive group area for all college students who’re curious about filmmaking,” says Jennifer Lavatory, who participated within the cinematography observe in Narrative Fellows from 2021 to 2022 and is now an in-house video producer for The Studio at Reel Works, a separate manufacturing firm with inside and exterior purchasers.

“They’re making a pipeline that basically must be strengthened between the communities in New York Metropolis and the movie trade at massive,” provides Lavatory, who’s 25. “It exists right here, however not for younger city expertise who wouldn’t have connections to the movie trade in any other case.”

Walter and Williams “make an amazing staff,” she provides. “They supply a extremely robust imaginative and prescient for the way forward for the group.”