Skip to My Rick, an almost-two-minute film created by seventh-grade drama students at the Academy, is one of 16 films selected from nearly 450 submissions from around the globe for the Experiments in Cinema v. 20.0 Youth Lens Festival.
“The students wanted to make a film, and this is what they came up with,” says Becca Holmes, who teaches Theatrical Process, a performing arts option for Academy seventh graders. She decided they would create a film for the competition so that the students would have a deadline and get a real-life look at the film industry.
“Having taught most of the students last year in sixth grade, I wanted to keep the drama momentum going. We read several plays and worked on monologues, but it wasn’t until we began making the film that they became truly excited and invested.”
Becca’s students developed the concept — three boys ignore the liminal space between boyhood and manhood, wrote the script and directed, acted in it (along with three of their teachers), and handled the filming and editing. “The students contributed in countless ways,” she says, “from camera work to the fabulous title. They had to ‘hire’ the adult actors and correspond with them professionally about shoot times and such. They have learned to appreciate film as a visual medium and to differentiate it from theater.”
Click here to watch Skip to My Rick.
Work on the seventh graders’ next film — a longer piece about students in detention experimenting with an old Ouija board — is underway.
The Youth Lens Festival is Thursday, April 17, 4-5:30 p.m., at the Guild Cinema, 3405 Central Ave. NE, Albuquerque.
