Building a base to prepare young people for careers in film production
When Creative Media Group founder Maria Taylor drove through the Bay Vista Park neighborhood in Miami looking for a single-family house to serve as the hub for her not-for-profit arts business, she didn’t expect a home made from shipping containers to take her breath away.
“I saw their house and was like, ‘What is that?’ The sun was shining and I was walking around and got out of my car and started walking toward their house,” Taylor said.
She saw architects Marcelo Ertorteguy and Sara Valente’s house built from weathering steel shipping containers and envisioned the potential for a different kind of micro-campus to teach underprivileged youths about film production and the creative arts. She struck up a conversation with Ertorteguy, who had designed shipping container architecture for six of the 10 years he lived in New York City alongside Valente, his partner and co-founder of creative firm Stereotank.
Creative Media will invest $60,000 developing its Upper East Side Miami arts campus built with shipping containers on an open tract. Plans call for a July opening. In conversations with local real estate agents, Taylor frequently heard much higher prices close to $500,000 to buy a singlefamily home to convert into space that would meet the needs of her film production training enterprise.
Rather than buying a home and gutting the walls to create a soundstage, Taylor and Ertorteguy made a concept design that has four shipping containers as interior studio spaces in a Ushaped formation that would serve as a courtyard. Space in one of the containers could be used for a video editing suite. After buying the containers used to make the campus, Taylor and her husband, Tony Delerme, will own the land.
The campus opening will coincide with MiamiDade County’s academic summer and allow students age 15 and up to participate in programming at no cost to them or their families thanks to grant funding. They are not building the campus and working with potential filmmakers to make a profit.
Taylor and Delerme think that teaching youths about the filmmaking and production business will give them the skills they need to create film projects. Those at least 18 then will be able to work alongside them on projects for clients for Crashing Waves Pictures, their film production company, or work on other television or film productions on their own.
Creative Media recently partnered with Genesis Hopeful Haven, a foster care organization in Homestead, and taught a five-week workshop about cinematography peppered with life skills. The goal of the workshop was for youths to be comfortable on sets and come away with skills that would allow them to work on professional films.
Teenagers from Cutler Bay to Miami Gardens learned how to produce films using their smartphones like filmmaker Matthew Cherry does, and how to organize a production. Cherry, a former professional football player, won an Academy Award in 2020 for producing an animated short film called “Hair Love.”
Creative Media’s youth leader Julien Pierre-Louis, 18, is one of the teens who learned about filmmaking through the multiweek program. Pierre-Louis, a freshman at Robert Morgan Technical College, was homeless after his father left the family when he was 16. As a youth in the foster care system, he said the program showed him career possibilities as a creative professional and provided him with personal support.
“I joined the program and at first was not really into it, but then when I started doing it, I saw it could help me with music,” he said of his other interest. “I could do music videos, music production and everything. We came up with the idea to do a short movie that’s on YouTube now, and we had a big place where we could shoot a movie. Ever since then, I keep in contact with them and now I’m here trying to make it.”
Pierre-Louis’ fellow youth leader Giovanni Carter, 18, a student at My Life My Power International Preparatory Academy, said working with Creative Media was fun and he appreciated how engaging Taylor and Delerme were in teaching him about the arts.
While Taylor considers Black directors like Ava DuVernay and Spike Lee as inspirations on a national level, she’s found in her work as a filmmaker in Miami that Black and brown people don’t operate cameras or work behind the scenes as much as their racial and ethnic counterparts.
“We have ability and are capable, but don’t have access,” Taylor said. “Partnering with underserved youth is important to give them access we didn’t have. We realized in the workshop that our young men were brilliant, but couldn’t afford $4,000 Sony cameras.”
Taylor and Delerme launched Crashing Waves Pictures in 2011, after Taylor first worked as an actor and reached a point in her career when she wanted to produce her own content and be more hands-on with filmmaking.
In 2020, when the couple moved to Miami from New York City, the effect of the coronavirus pandemic made them want to serve people in the community. They realized that each film production they worked on gave ample opportunity for people to learn and gain professional experience. The team launched Creative Media Group in January 2021. Seven months later, Creative Media’s board members Vanessa Quarentello and Michelle St. Jules joined Taylor and Delerme’s team.
KonstantiaKontaxis is a professor and chair of the University of Miami’s Department of Cinematic Arts in the School of Communication. She’s also a proponent for young people of diverse backgrounds to use free tools like TikTok to hone their film editing and content creation skills.
“TikTok and other social media platforms have generated a paradigm shift allowing young creators from all backgrounds to distribute creative material in ways not possible even 10 years ago,” Kontaxis said.
“With simple equipment, young creators are now able to reach millions of views — a number that used to be exclusive to large studio distribution. Not only have these platforms amplified diverse young voices but allowed young creators and their viewers to drive creative content.”
Creating a central creative campus that could be better for the environment matters to Taylor. She learned from Ertorteguy and her own research that shipping containers can make for less expensive, sustainable building. They can be stacked up to seven levels high and be modified, cut and adapted for reuse. Logistically, they are easier to trans
port through disassembly, rather than the demolition that occurs with most construction projects.
Ertorteguy sees the value in using shipping containers made of weathering steel because of their local availability and durability. Weathering steel allows containers to withstand transport across the seas through inclement weather because of its combination of steel alloys.
“The shipping container is the perfect object,” Ertorteguy said, as he described his family’s experimental Miami home. “A lot of them are not being used. They travel here from China, deliver merchandise and just sit here in the ports. They don’t go back. Many people buy them for storage.”
Ertorteguy said the containers used for his home were sourced from container yards near Medley. After developing a rapport with workers there, he learned the containers usually come from PortMiami and the local trucking industry.
The versatility of the containers bodes well for Taylor’s plans to further develop and build on the Creative Media hub after it opens in the Upper East Side.
As the development of the creative campus continues, Taylor is hopeful the site’s proximity to Miami’s Wynwood Arts District can provide youths like Pierre-Louis and Carter with an inspiring place to explore arts careers that otherwise could be inaccessible.
Having grown professionally and personally in his time working with Creative Media, Carter is optimistic about his and the not-for-profit’s future.
“I can’t wait to see where it goes,” he said.