Moving Movies

I'm not entirely sure how much of this I've written about and how much I've just thought about writing about. Thusly, here goes.

Sometime early last summer, I was hanging at my local haunt Metro Coffee & Wine. They were going to have an event to introduce a new menu section and wanted to incorporate a fundraiser. Ever on the lookout to hook people up with Phoenix, I began the sell. They bit and that was that.

Until.

One day, again at Metro, I was talking with my friend Debbie who works there and is also a filmmaker. I ws talking to Debbie about how grea it would be for my kids to be able to get involved in telling their stories and experiencing writing in an authentic way.

We were off to the races. Debbie spoke to some people she knew at the Sarasota Film Festival, we had a series of meetings and the pilot of the Young Screenwriters Program was built. For three months, six of my students met twice a week after school to create screenplays of their own. It was an amazing thing to watch more than any assignment I have ever given, these screenplays pulled in my students.

Last week, in conjunction with the festival, there was an event to honor my students. We included a staged reading of their screenplays as well as a Q&A portion. The place was packed. Each of the students came and all but one brought their families and extended families (that's pretty big for my kids).

The video below is a taste of what happened. The entire process was amazing. The story was picked up by this local paper, this local paper and this local paper. It was awesome.

The idea is that, somehow, we'll be able to actually raise money so that we can purchase some minor film equipment in order that our students can take their concepts all the way from the page to the screen.

Here's hoping.

More later.

technorati tags:SRQ, SFF, phoenixacad, education, screenwriting