Switchgrass Film Lab

is an annual film lab for students, grades 7-12+, living in Yuma County, Colorado.

The Filmmaking lab MISSION: to provide a filmmaking education that positions youth for self-expression, leadership, and community building in the world they want to belong to.

Prairie Futures, an art initiative traversing the American High Plain partners with New York-based filmmakers Erin Harper (born and raised in Yuma) and Erin Greenwell to guide aspiring filmmakers. The program focuses on site-specific films created by youth to promote team building, media literacy, production skills, oral history, and storytelling through multimedia.

Teen participants are given prompts and learn filmmaking objectives while crewing in the field over 4-5 days. They edit their films within 2-3 days. Completed short, cross-genre videos represent the world as teen participants see it. All videos are showcased in a community screening at the Yuma movie theatre.

Each year focuses on a specific medium; sound production, composition, animation, or choreography. Guest artists contribute expertise in the featured medium. In 2023 composer, sound designer, and educator, Terry Dame introduced field sound recorders and microphones to capture found sound that the students transformed into midi sound from which they built compositions in Garage Band.

In 2024, students learned 2D and 3D animation in Adobe After Effects.

Our anticipated fourth year, 2025, will be special. We are expanding a series of workshops set against the landscape of our new partnership with Fox Ranch, a nature conservancy nurturing 14,000 acres of diverse ecological prairie ground. Filmmakers will step into the role of creative changemakers. In response to exploring their natural surroundings, participants will start creating from a prompt such as, “Reimagine the world you want to belong to.”   

The film workshops will culminate in an immersive community screening of the final films projected against the natural landscape. These films will open the door to post-screening community discussions. 

The entirety of this filmmaking experience lays the groundwork for a radical shift in community engagement and the potential for long-term systems change.  The creative process helps to strengthen young artists’ connections to the roots of local living while also helping to develop their emerging artistic voices. The films created serve as platforms that support meaningful connections within the community, paving the pathway to a more sustainable future for rural living.

LONG TERM GOALS:

We want to expand this film lab across small and mid-sized towns and cities. This expansion could include; ascending levels of technique to create a 4-year program, which employs mentoring opportunities for alums, portfolio building for film school applications, and cross-country exchanges among youth film crews.

With the expansion of this program, we look forward to the possibility of a multi-thematic focus that could include; building a local film festival, cross-country exchanges, and providing mentoring opportunities for alum. Other film-hybrid practices are illustration, animation, scoring, dance, and theatre.

SOMA Media Lab

2023-ongoing

Sponsored by The Maplewood Arts and Culture Department, SOMA Media Lab strives to be an ongoing home for teen filmmakers. Weekend workshops include writing practices, screenings, shot and scene analysis, storyboarding, and pre-producing. In the field, students learn how to shoot original personal narrative storytelling with smartphones, lighting, and sound equipment. A Mac editing lab with Adobe Premier software is available on weekends and weekdays for students to work independently in addition to the editing workshops provided.

Cinematic Storytelling with Smartphones

Las estrellas, Summer 2017.

Inspired by the activism of Las Estrellas— a self-formed group of high school women living in my rural hometown who educate and support their community in having a political voice— I enthusiastically volunteered to teach these students a quick n' dirty filmmaking workshop on smartphones. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Padcaster, I was able to teach the girls how to trick out their phones with stabilizing devices, lights, lenses, external microphones, and the Filmic Pro app to tell stories cinematically.

Future gatherings are in the works including social media activism, personal storytelling, guerilla distribution strategies, and filmmaking apprenticeships.