Anyone can make a movie.
That’s what the Oak Cliff Film Festival (OCFF) wants to show students during its annual student workshop. The program began as a one-weekend crash course in 2022 and now takes place over several months leading up to OCFF.
Students meet with the workshop team over three Saturdays to learn the basics of filming, interact with professional filmmakers, and get hands-on experience with professional equipment. They are grouped together to write a script, film it, and, as long as their film is completed before the festival, screen it during OCFF.
The workshop is free to attend and will be presented in partnership with ad agency TRG and Dallas nonprofit For Oak Cliff, with support from Canon. The first two meetings took place in March and April, with the final gathering set for June 7 at For Oak Cliff’s main campus so participants can screen their (mostly) finished films for peers and receive instructor feedback.
Ashton Campbell, OCFF’s festival director, says the program started to increase accessibility to film resources and education for Oak Cliff’s youth.
“Some of the schools don’t have any kind of media classes or media production classes, cameras, computers, et cetera,” says Campbell.
Festival organizers contacted Xavier Henderson and Taylor Toynes at For Oak Cliff, who were excited to bring a program like this to life by providing a space to host meetings and helping spread the word to local students.
Eric Jewell, the film department chair at MediaTech Institute, leads workshops. He started making movies as a kid and knows how valuable the workshops can be for aspiring student filmmakers. Jewell says he lied about his age in junior high to get a job so he could buy his first camera, which he used to make a movie called Killer Jello (the first in a trilogy). Now, he wants to help the next generation make movies of their own.
As a young filmmaker, he figured things out through trial and error, recruiting friends to help make Star Trek and Mad Max parodies in his backyard. Though Jewell is fond of those memories, he marvels at the chance for young creators to connect with other people their age, an opportunity he says would have significantly impacted his journey as a filmmaker.
Still, the OCFF Student Workshop is not designed solely for film obsessives. Even if a participant is casually interested in filmmaking or realizes it’s not for them after participating in the workshop, Jewell says the experience is invaluable.
“This can be applied to anything,” he explains. “[It] doesn’t have to be filmmaking. It’s working in small or large group dynamics. Who’s sort of managing the thing? Who’s the project manager…the producer? How are they getting along? How are they working with each other? You know, these kinds of skills work in life no matter what you do.”
Each year, OCFF recruits professional filmmakers to speak with the students about their experiences working in the industry. This year’s featured guest was Jasmine Quiñones, who has worked on projects for brands like Nike and FUJIFILM. She spoke with students at the April 5 workshop about carving a path through the filmmaking landscape by focusing on what fulfilled her creatively instead of chasing likes or views on social media.
”I have been super creative since I was a child,” Quinones tells us. “Straight up would pick up anything imaginable to create with.”
Even with the success of her creative endeavors, she says she was never predestined to be a filmmaker.
”Nobody in my family was a filmmaker or anything, so it’s not like I just found a camera in my dad’s basement and just started filming that way,” explains Quiñones.
She got her start making YouTube videos in high school but never considered filmmaking as a career option until she got to college. She saw a music video with dynamic editing and wanted to figure out how it was made – a lightbulb moment that set her on her journey.
Quiñones also wants to show people who look like her that they can hold the spotlight in creative fields.
“If I look at the demographic of the majority of [creators she admires], they’re all dudes,” says Quiñones. “And … they're really talented, and I love their work, but sometimes I look at it and I'm like, ‘why are none of my favorite filmmakers women? Why are they not women of color? Why are they not in the queer community?’”
Quiñones’ journey is exactly what the OCFF wants students who take part in the workshop to see is possible for them. You can start small, you can focus on what excites you, and you can create opportunities for yourself and others as you grow.
The education and the conversations with filmmakers like Quiñones have inspired students to make mockumentary-style shorts, experiment with nonlinear storytelling, and express their emotions through film.
For his part, Campbell says it’s gratifying to witness the festival’s work create a welcoming environment for attendees.
“Anybody who wants to come in can come,” he says. “Too much nowadays, we're just divided. We don't want there to be any division with the group … we're trying to put people together [and] collaborate.”
The next OCFF student workshop is on June 7. Anyone with a student interested in taking part in the last session of this year’s Student Workshop can reach out to [email protected].
