Westwind fosters filmmaking ‘creatives’

At Searcy High School in the early 2000s, I didn’t know that I wanted to become a filmmaker.

But I did know that I enjoyed writing screenplays — I wrote my first feature (garbage), when I was in 12th grade — and I enjoyed using my family’s camcorder to film things. Searcy really didn’t have the tools or means to help foster the creative side of my brain, though. I was lucky my school had a television production class, where my friends and I would create news packages and have them broadcast locally. My teacher, Jacki Romey, sensed I wanted to do more than just news reports. She would let us borrow the school’s audio/visual equipment to make silly short films, and we used the editing computers to make crudely drawn cartoons. She is the sole reason I even attempted to make films.

Almost 20 years later, it’s nice to see Arkansas making an honest attempt to foster the arts, especially filmmaking, with programs like Inception to Projection in Hot Springs, the Micheaux Award, and the Arkansas Cinema Society’s Filmmaking Lab for Teen Girls (which is currently taking applications). Another newer resource for students that I was introduced to this past weekend is the Westwind School for Performing Arts in North Little Rock, and last week Westwind held its first documentary film festival.

Westwind is an open enrollment public charter school for students grades six, seven and eight. Its goal as a middle school is to provide an equitable and engaging educational experience that is enhanced by the arts — meaning it infuses the core subjects like math, social studies and science with lectures and assignments that have an artistic approach. For example, this documentary festival was a part of the student’s English curriculum.

As I arrived for the film festival, I was given the grand tour. Tucked in the woods off Crystal Hill Road, the building has an unconventional, open layout. There are several areas and stages where kids can practice dance, choir and music. I passed by one classroom that held their audio/ visual equipment, where the students record a weekly news report. Talking to the staff, one thing stood out: teachers never referred to the kids as “students,” they called them “creatives.” At first, this caught me off guard, but

then I realized it was meant as more of a form of respect, treating the students almost as professional artists. And they perform as well as professionals, as they have performed several live events, including a rendition of “The Lion King” at the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.

Their English instructor, Akaylah Jones, set up this specific assignment because each of her classes was studying works of nonfiction: “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice;” “Code Talker: a Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War II;” and “Farewell to Manzanar.” Jones has been accompanying these readings by showing her classes documentaries so the students can “visualize these events, see what exactly happened and make those textto-world connections.” It’s impressive she was able to get middle schoolers interested in historical documentaries. They responded well to these films, so Jones figured they would benefit from making their own short documentaries.

For the assignment, Jones said that the students could work in groups of four, allowing them the option to work with the kids from the other grades. She said this led to some interesting pairings. There was even an instance where a sixth-grader was a team leader to several seventh- and eighth-graders. But, as the school doesn’t have an actual film program, the students had to be resourceful. They utilized what technology they had available. A lot of the films were shot on iPhones, some even incorporated archival footage in their films.

I sat in the Westwind auditorium and watched 11 short documentaries. The subject matter ranged from simple personal stories about basketball and gymnastics to more complicated topics such as slavery and feminism. While I could nitpick the technical aspects of each film — the framing, the inconsistent audio, the fact that some of these were shot in portrait mode rather than landscape — I realize that these are 11-, 12-, and 13-yearolds making these shorts. In all honesty, their attempts are probably more impressive than the stuff I was filming at their age. In fact, the whole festival made me nostalgic for my high school TV production class.

After the festival was over, parents were fawning over their creatives’ creations. I stopped and talked to the executive director of the school, Theresa Timmons. She was quite pleased with the students’ efforts. She even remarked that she hopes they can expand the festival next year to incorporate other genres, as there’s more than one student who’s interested in narrative films and animation. She said this is only the second operating year for the school, but she hopes to expand the student body and the artistic programs that the school offers.