In a leafy corner of Pinecrest Gardens, an amazing park in South Florida, Iair K., 6th grader by day, budding director by night, focuses his video camera on Scene 8 of a groundbreaking but yet untitled film.
“Take 1,” he begins. “Three, two, one, action!”
Three 11-year-old actors, Ashley A., Isabel B. and Vincent R., start walking down the sidewalk, gesturing, flipping hair, sounding just like a group of kids on the way to school. Which, after all, is precisely what this scene is all about: three friends on the first day of class.
But there’s something more, something beyond the braces on the lead actress and the school uniform on one photo director. These elementary and middle-schoolers have embarked on an experiment: a 15- to 20-minute feature film produced, directed, designed and acted in by the children.
Nurturing new talent
They are part of a new after-school program created by Dolphin Entertainment Inc., a Miami production company. The idea is to nurture talent for careers on–and off–the big screen.
The only thing provided to the kids is the script, the story of a klutzy young girl who can’t get The Guy to notice her.
For Ashley, this kind of experiment is invaluable. Though she plays the lead, what she really wants to do when she grows up is perform behind the camera–as a costume designer. School drama programs don’t offer film experience, and students often must wait until college to do feature-film work.
“It’s great to do something like this because you get to learn all about the different jobs that go into making a movie,” Ashley says.
‘It’s OK to mess up’
Not to mention some life lessons: “You also learn that it’s OK to mess up. If you do, you just go on. You don’t stop. You don’t give up.”
When her mother, Sandy, heard about the film program, she says she knew it would be perfect for her daughter. Ashley has always organized the neighborhood kids into performances, but is shy about being on stage herself. In the film program, every student acts in the film and also has a job behind the scenes.
The children’s film program debuted last summer, in three, three-week camp sessions where more than 70 students learned about acting and producing for film and television. The camp was the brainchild of Bill O’Dowd, a Dolphin Entertainment founder.
Dolphin raises financing and produces movies and miniseries programming for U.S. and international television. O’Dowd, who also is a professor at the University of Miami Film School, hired two of his former students to run a film camp at a local hotel. It was so well-attended that one of its directors, Sarah Soboleski, suggested continuing it through the school year.
Creating great storytellers
“Maybe [the kids] won’t all be actors or directors, but they will be great storytellers when they’re finished here,” she says. “And they’re also learning about the pitfalls and rewards of working together, of creating something. They’re becoming problem-solvers.”
The after-school program lasts a semester–about 13 weeks. The first five or six weeks are devoted to pre-production, everything from auditioning to choosing the set designer to organizing a film schedule. The following five to six weeks are taken by the actual filming. The final editing and planning for the promotion and premiere come last.
Halfway into the production of their first film, some kids already have stars in their eyes. Isabel, for instance, hopes to get an agent and begin auditioning for commercials as soon as she completes the program.
“Here, I’m learning things I can use,” she says. “How to become the person I’m acting, how to pace myself, how to do emotions with my face and hands.”
