Fall 2010—Spring 2012

The GEAR UP Documentary Film Initiative, produced/directed by Littleglobe, will utilize collaboration and mentorship to create documentary media that follows the lives of five to seven New Mexico adolescents in their last two years of high school. Littleglobe’s approach to the creation of these films will be collaborative and participatory, with an emphasis on student mentorship and community engagement. Workshops in creative and narrative writing, storyboarding, conducting interviews, camera operations, light, and sound as well as facilitated community dialogue sessions will inform the creation of each film. Participatory filmmaking, community workshops, and mentorship will help students and their communities explore the idea of personal and academic success—including post-secondary education options – within the contexts (and influence) of peer groups, family and community.

Littleglobe assumes that individuals and communities already attach a certain value to education (negative, positive or neutral). This project is intended to explore these values. Exploring values through creative exercises and filmmaking requires the active participation of students and their communities. It is only when individuals and community residents “turn the camera on themselves” that we can hope to get an accurate and compelling portrait of lives and perspectives regarding post-secondary education. This process will encourage the reflection, self empowerment and capacity to address and perhaps challenge any long-held notions about identity, family, community, and education.

Project Plan

In order to create a starting-point for collaborative storytelling, and as a means to engage students in front of and behind the camera, Littleglobe will provide various workshops centered around the life of school, peer groups, families and communities. These initial visits will lead to more concentrated work in selected schools, creating and/or focusing on classes of young filmmakers, using the structure of an intensive one-day workshop and collaboratively creating a portrait of each high school. After this initial set of workshops, by mid-October, 2010, Littleglobe will choose five schools as the project’s main focus for the rest of the program. Subsequently, Littleglobe will engage in filmmaking and community dialogue workshops with all five schools (and the surrounding communities) for the rest of 2010 and through spring of 2011. During the spring of 2011, the Littleglobe team will begin to select the 5-7 students to become the primary collaborators and subjects of the documentary film project. This group will work together throughout the school year of 2011-2012 and will generate a combination of student-created and team-generated documentary content/footage which will be edited by the Littleglobe team into a single feature-length documentary film. This final documentary film will be used to facilitate a local, regional and national dialogue about what teenagers face as they finish high school and move into the world beyond.

Throughout the project, Littleglobe will work closely with GEAR UP staff. Littleglobe is grateful to the New Mexico Higher Education Department (NMHED) and GEAR UP New Mexico for funding this project.

Littleglobe

...fostering life-affirming connections across the boundaries that divide us.
223 N. Guadalupe, #427 Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-980-6218 daphnell@littleglobe.org www.littleglobe.org