By Kevin Zimmerman
As the three video makers prepared to read through their public service announcement script, they realized they were one actor short.
“I guess I’ll read the part of the unknown female,” Daquan Herring said.
So donning a fashionable black hat he christened the Patty LaBelle, Daquan begins his spiel about not leaving trash behind in city parks during any of the free movie nights this summer. In this cramped room at the Lost Battalion Recreation Center, 93-29 Queens Blvd. in Rego Park, filled with computers, training manuals and blank compact discs the other film students stop working to watch the rehearsal. Daquan and his teammates, Evan Jackson and Brandan Sandy, jump in with their lines as the trio huddles around a laptop reading the screen.
“OK, that’s good,” Shawn Smith, multi-media instructor told the three teens. “But you’re going to have learn the script. You don’t want to be like TV newspeople waiting for the teleprompter to tell you what to say next.”
The PSA, which the three teenagers planned to shoot last week at a Manhattan park, represents their final project for this year’s Youth Made Media program at the City Park’s Foundation. This non-profit entity, which works alongside the City Parks Department, creates educational, recreational and artistic programs year-round for New York’s children, teens and adults.
“We’re sort of the kissing cousin of the Parks Department,” Jamie Zelaya, director for Youth Made Media, said.
Zelaya started the media programs about three years ago as a way to provide city teens with what he labeled media literacy. Although the program includes instruction in Final Cut Pro, Adobe Suite and other photographic and video programs, it also teaches participants the proper way to write a resumé, prepare a cover letter and how to go about networking to land their next job.
“It gives them confidence and gives them a sense of identity,” Zelaya said. “They learn to discover their own tongues and learn to tell their own stories.”
Working individually, in pairs and small groups, the high school students were charged with creating a five- to seven-minute video piece that could be a documentary, narrative or self-portrait — a sort of recorded diary with images and sound — as long as it told a story.
The Park Department’s Green Team, which Daquan has volunteered with before, approached the trio about its need for a video promo urging moviegoers to keep the parks clean after the shows. It sent a script over to the Youth Made Media group along with a set of four official Green Team T-shirts as wardrobe, then the teens got to work.
“We edited the script to a point that we were comfortable with it,” Daquan said.
Both Daquan and Brandan, who attend school at downtown Brooklyn’s Young Adult Borough Centers, arrived at Youth Made Media with video creating experience. Still others come in having never shot a photograph or made a video. The group spends the first three months of the program immersed in teaching sessions about how to compose a shot, how to write a script and how to use the software to put it all together.
Once January rolls around, Zelaya and Smith even hire some of the students for internships. This allows the teens to shadow the two men and see for themselves what working in a creative field entails. Of course, Zelaya said, what they learn is not limited to making videos.
“The media arts is integrated into anything you could do,” Zelaya said. “But it is always used in a collaborative effort.”
Daquan, however, fully expects to use what he has learned at Youth Made Media in his career.
“I’m going to be a director and editor and producer,” Daquan said. “And, I’m going to have my own talk show and variety show and production company.”
For more information on Youth Made Media and City Park’s Foundation, check out cityparksfoundation.org.
News Editor Kevin Zimmerman can be reached at kzimmerman@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4541.
