The Factory

By Jason Jakaitis, The Factory Manager

Spring is here and there is plenty to celebrate at The Factory aside from the change in weather.

Last Wednesday thirty intrepid students gathered at the Bay Area Video Coalition’s facility to partake in a Young Filmmaker’s Workshop put on by BAVC and Alternatives in Action. The goal of the four-hour training intensive was to help students further develop their storytelling skills and to make them aware of one of the most prestigious screening opportunities for youth filmmakers: AIA's annual Project Youth View event in Alameda.

by Jason Jakaitis, Factory Manager

An exhilarating and innovative partnership between BAVC’s Factory filmmaking program and the Mozilla Foundation culminated recently in two Factory youth attending the “Media, Freedom and the Web” Mozilla Festival in London – and presenting one of the keynote addresses!

by Ewen Wright, Factory Assistant

Since joining the NextGen department at BAVC in late March, I’ve had an overwhelming number of positive experiences -- I think that should be an expectation and standard of working with youth and youth media.  What I didn’t anticipate however, was the amount of inspiration and the level of talent I would encounter in my co-workers.  That mildly insulting old adage of “those who can’t do, teach” is completely debunked by the group of youth educators that occupy our Oakland office everyday.

Two recently-completed films from NextGen’s Factory filmmaking program are about to make their theatrical debut in the Big Apple!

Creative Growth and History in These Streets, screening at the Paley Center’s 2011 DocFest as part of the Docu-Jam youth documentary showcase, were both produced over the summer as part of The Factory’s Community Filmmaking Partnership (CFP) program. “CFPs” are a collaboration between the youth filmmakers in BAVC’s Factory filmmaking program and socially-conscious Bay Area organizations that would benefit from some form of media documentation – a documentary, a public service announcement, a portrait piece, etc. Teams of youth filmmakers collaborate with these organizations to create films to advance their cause.

Last Friday marked the official end to The Factory's 2010-2011 school year programming here at BAVC. 

Each year The Factory, BAVC's advanced filmmaking program for motivated teens, provides students with the opportunity to develop their storytelling skills by creating their own original films.  In the summer, The Factory partners with other Bay Area non-profits and Factory students work in small teams to create to produce films that the partner organizations can feature on their websites and use in fundraising capaigns and recruiting pitches.

by Jason Jakaitis, Factory Manager

What a year it's been for BAVC Factory youth Lauren Lindberg and Zoe Salnave!  This Monday, July 11th, the two young women will be participants in the ITVS live-chat event LEADING THE CONVERSATION: Young Women's Voices in the MediaThe event, moderated by BAVC's Jen Gilomen (Director of Public Media Strategies), is the latest honor in what has been an incredibly accomplished and transformative year for Lauren and Zoe.

On Wednesday, June 29th nine students from two of BAVC’s NextGen youth media programs had the tremendous privilege to take the Black Panther Legacy Bus tour of West Oakland. Conducted by David Hilliard, former Black Panther Chief of Staff and founder of the Huey P. Newton Foundation, the three-hour tour stops at eighteen historically-significant sites in the Black Panther’s efforts to improve the living conditions of African-Americans in West Oakland.

Each summer as the school year comes to an end, The Factory program at BAVC shifts its focus.  While during the school year students in The Factory design and carry out their own independent short film productions, the program takes advantage of the summer schedule by collaborating with community organizations around the Bay Area and producing short films that feature the organization's work.