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Right Quick Productions: Creating Direct and Indirect Impact Through Documentary Filmmaking

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Posted on October 13, 2003

Expecting Men is slated for release locally in January 2004 and nationally during summer 2004.

Drama, humanity, humor, hardships, and heart collide in documentaries. They remind you that no matter how trivial, misunderstood, taboo, or veiled a subject may be- everyone has a story. Everyone has a voice. It is the mission of Right Quick Productions, a young nonprofit production company based out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to let the voices of our community be heard. We are committed to cultivating the artistic voices of underserved communities by providing mentorship to aid in the development of these voices and producing documentary works that increase awareness and opportunities for dialogue that will in turn, empower the communities we serve and reflect across the nation.

What follows is the story of how one person's vision for a small film about a leadership initiative has swelled into a movement that expands the role of media and the arts as a means of generating and promoting social action. This is our journey as educators and education advocates to extend our reach beyond the classroom and into the mainstream via the grassroots campaign efforts of a nonprofit.

In September 2000, Kira Orange-Jones, a recent graduate of Wesleyan University in Film Studies and Political Theory, began her assignment with Teach For America as a fourth grade teacher at Eden Park Elementary in Baton Rouge. While her college classmates were packing up their tripods to move to Hollywood, she was headed south to devote the next two years to a movement that is dedicated to closing the achievement gap in low-income public schools across the country. She knew one day she would make movies, but now was a time to give back. Kira, a woman of color born and raised in the Bronx, saw first hand the doors that were open to her as a result of a strong academic foundation. In high-school she commuted an hour and a half into the city to attend Horace Mann on scholarship. She was the only person she knew in her neighborhood that even went to college. At Wesleyan, one of less than a handful of women of color in the film major, she held her first camera and says her life was changed forever. This pivotal moment stuck with her and laid the groundwork for her vision to give her students the self-efficacy to tell their own stories.

Principal character David Barenco is in his third year at the Young Leaders Academy, a rigorous leadership initiative that fosters character development in young African-American boys.

While teaching, she discovered that Baton Rouge was the ideal backdrop for a documentary that explores a nation's growing unrest with not only racial disparities, but also a troubled education system (Louisiana is ranked 3rd in the nation for high school dropouts) and class immobility due to stifling poverty (47% of Louisiana children are below the poverty line). She was struck by the unique voices she encountered in her classroom. These voices were too often just a dull hum heard below the surface of the startling statistics of devastating poverty, crime, and educational failure reported on the 10 o'clock news. When something human is reduced to the number-riddled language of sociologists, even the most socially conscious of viewers merely shake their heads and speak of the enormity and impossibility of the situation. The message becomes redundant, removed and diluted.

While Kira and her fellow Teach For America colleagues were consumed by the tedious work of first-year teachers by day, their nights were filled with inspired dialogue about how to tackle the enormous problems they saw on the news and in their classroom. Realizing that the movement that had brought them to Baton Rouge had also simply started as one person's vision to address an overwhelming concern, their passion soon transformed into a sense of purpose and urgency. How could teachers with a range of backgrounds in film, sociology, history and photography get their students' voices heard? Make a film. They thought that if they could apply their skills to this collective goal, the impact would directly affect both their students and those who heard their messages.

The strength of this vision attracted Liz Masten and Rachel Graham to produce and edit the film respectively. Other educators and advocates pooled their efforts to find mentors, write grants, and raise funds in the community. With funds secured and a production crew hired, they began shooting in July 2001.

Expecting Men follows Will Cotchery through is first Year at the Young Leaders Academy.

Expecting Men highlights the perspectives of four Baton Rouge youth who deal head-on with the statistics and stereotypes portrayed by the mainstream media. The film reveals the unique points of view of three African-American boys who are members of Baton Rouge's Young Leaders' Academy, a rigorous leadership initiative that works year-round, after-school and on weekends, with African-American boys between the ages of 7 and 14 to "nurture the development of leadership abilities of young African-American males, empowering them to improve the quality of their lives and assist them in becoming productive citizens." The vision of this organization is to create the next generation of leaders to the benefit of society as a whole.

Juxtaposed with the power of this revolutionary organization and the young men who have discovered success at an early age, is the fourth character. Nate Brown, in his twenties, possesses strengths and talents of his own, though unlike our other characters, never had access to a rigorous leadership academy. He serves as the voice of reflection forty years after the Civil Rights Movement and ten years after his own departure from school in the tenth grade. His narrative reveals to the viewer the modern day struggles of young African American men forging a path for themselves and questions the need for a new kind of movement.

Locally, Expecting Men's 13-minute trailer has screened in a series of test focus group and garnered strong reaction. This summer we screened the trailer in Houston to three focus groups that consisted of college students, young educators, and community activists. The film was well-received by each group. Our audiences were particularly captivated by the implications surrounding the Young Leaders' Academy's existence in Baton Rouge forty years after the Civil Rights Movement. Right Quick Productions is successfully generating a positive buzz about Expecting Men, its extensive distribution strategy and grassroots-style outreach campaign.

August officially began our post-production phase of Expecting Men. In order to achieve our projected results, we began strategizing our distribution and outreach efforts in January 2003. At that time, I became intensely attracted to the mission and came on board as the part-time Director of Distribution and Educational Outreach while I was completing my undergraduate studies at Boston University. Hundreds of conference calls, emails and a few flights between my dorm in the heart of New England and Right Quick Productions' start-up office in the Deep South have primed our distribution strategy to go national.

Devin Wright shoots a Saturday Young Leaders Academy session while Director Kira Orange-Jones mentors.

I intended to be a part of a different movement this fall as a 2003 Teach For America corps member, but I was drawn to join this project full-time in August because I realized that it was not just about telling the stories of one community, but about telling the stories that existed in the hearts and minds of individuals in communities all over the country. As a Mississippi native, I saw the similarities Baton Rouge had to my own hometown. These are communities defined by statistics that perpetuate ignorant generalizations and hinder substantial discussions about how to solve very real problems.

"It is our mission to let the voices be heard. We believe that these young men have individually compelling, inspiring stories to tell, that their voices aren't heard enough, and their voices have the power to impact many. At the same time, their stories also have a universality that reaches across the country," says Expecting Men Director and Right Quick Productions Executive Director, Kira Orange-Jones.

Our outreach strategy has involved massive research and we've probably reinvented a wheel or two. We've utilized the network of organizers within the Baton Rouge community, the local and national Teach For America corps, and our own personal base of supporters. Already we've been able to garner the support of socially conscious filmmakers such as Davis Guggenheim (film credits include Executive Producer of Training Day and Director of The First Year), Laura Dunn (Director of Student Academy Award Winner Green) and Brent Owens (HBO documentary filmmaker). The Internet has been helpful in not only identifying these filmmakers, but also in leading us to sites created solely for the purpose of aiding filmmakers like ourselves.

MediaRights.org has been an enormous service as we navigate the maze of distribution routes various filmmakers use, but also as we distinguish in what capacity we could be useful to others. Distribution is a pivotal step in realizing the long-term mission of Right Quick Productions. We have created a six-tier plan (http://www.rightquickproductions.org/DocProjectDistribution.htm) that includes film festivals, theatrical release, television broadcast, video rental and purchase, community partnerships, and working with secondary and higher education institutions.

Nate Brown, the only principal character not associated with the young Leaders Academy, reflects on his own youth.

Each tier is a means to our end. We believe by maximizing the size of our audience and its range, we will maximize the scope of our impact. It has become clear that we need two versions of the film to accommodate the range of audiences we aim to reach. The feature length version, Expecting Men, will be entered into festivals, screened in theaters across the country and broadcast in homes from New York City to Boise, Idaho. Garnering support and buzz within the industry is essential to build the momentum that will propel this movement into classrooms, community centers, and theaters alike.

Our shorter educational version, The Youth Documentary Project and its accompanying curriculum will be used to supplement classroom learning and community initiatives. In the secondary classrooms, the film will enhance social studies curricula and create a safe space to discuss the sensitive issues raised by the film, such as the societal limitations of race and class and how far our communities have come regarding such issues decades after the Civil Rights Movement. Providing youth with an opportunity to critically consider how the world at large will judge their individual and collective success, the film will generate essential dialogue on defining social change on a more tangible level.

While students work to define social change and evaluate their own actions, we will also be partnering with nonprofit and community organizations that have already delineated a path towards social change. Partnerships with such organizations will provide access to various forums and audiences that will be keenly interested in our conviction to use art as a vehicle for social action. Furthermore, these organizations will provide access to key policy-makers that can address the specific policy levers that surface in this film. This array of issues includes everything from a public transportation system that impedes economic mobility to race relations along a historical continuum.

Either version could be used to foster dialogue on our national college tour. The steady flow of ideas, growth, and learning make college campuses fertile ground for affecting social change through grassroots efforts. The tour, scheduled for February 2004, will enable Right Quick Productions to facilitate conversations between future philanthropic filmmakers, aspiring nonprofit innovators, tomorrow's educators and the influential leaders of a new generation, thus inspiring action and concrete results.

As the filmmaking process unfolded, the lives and attitudes of the Right Quick Productions staff were transformed and the vision began to come into focus. The investigative process inherent in filmmaking, outreach strategies and fundraising began to reveal the challenges of not only being an arts activist, but also becoming an arts activist. Daily activities revealed that art is both a means and an end. As an organization we began to recognize the value of cultivating the minds and artistic talents within our community. Our mission had to expand and so too did our movement. It would yield both an indirect and direct impact towards social change.

Access Granted emerging artist Sergio Stewart of Crestworth Middle compiles his portfolio for his first local gallery showing.

In order to accommodate this expansion of the movement and to achieve direct impact, Right Quick Productions initiated Access Granted in fall 2001, a unique program that provides mentorship in critical thinking, oral communication, writing, and photography to 15 high-school students in the Baton Rouge area. Our next initiative, slated to begin in the fall of 2004, is Seeing Colors, a multi-media component that will incorporate the analytical skill sets of Access Granted to have youth creating public service announcements, video projects and innovative web initiatives.

Everyday in the East Baton Rouge Parish, gifted children go to school and find the span of their education very narrow. With each passing year in a misguided but well-meaning effort to improve the state of education, academics come to mean finding the one right answer and result in stifled creativity. Arts education is virtually nonexistent, except for a few students who are labeled 'talented.' Regrettably, this standards-based reform does not prepare students for challenges of today's workforce; furthermore, it undercuts students' potential growth.

The outcome of arts education programming is creating Artists for Self and most importantly, Artists for Community who will mobilize individually and as a collective to raise awareness that instigates social change. As the school system becomes more and more stressed, educational institutions are increasingly leaning on community partnerships to provide students with the many benefits gained through arts education. Programs like Access Granted and Seeing Colors promote alternate means of learning to ensure that students prosper. Access Granted opens students' minds to productive ways to express themselves and Seeing Colors gives students the tools to close the digital divide.

What originally began as one person's vision for a film (Expecting Men) about a leadership Academy in Baton Rouge has swelled into a movement. All of these projects will drive our outreach efforts and ultimately Right Quick Productions' long-term mission. By not only creating films that shed light on the complex struggles within a town that is still reeling from the residual economic and social disparities left in Jim Crow's wake, but by also giving youth in our community the skills to take ownership over their influence in the media, we are challenging the media to widen the scope of the mainstream. Expecting Men and The Youth Documentary Project will set the stage for the young media artists of Access Granted and Seeing Colors to be the leaders, artists, educators and activists of tomorrow.

For more information on Expecting Men and Right Quick Productions, visit us at www.rightquickproductions.org.