Artistic director called to make film

A few years ago, a strange thing happened in Nathan Ross Freeman's home in the West End. One of his closets began filling up with digital tapes.

The tapes had an unusual effect on Freeman each time he walked by them.

"They, like, glowed in the dark, (saying) ‘What you going to do? You can't just leave us here,'" he said, chuckling.

Freeman is the founding artistic director of Authoring Action, in which teenage authors draw on their experiences to write literature for films and spoken-word presentations designed to effect positive changes in society. (Authoring Action was formerly known as the Winston-Salem Youth Arts Institute.)

The tapes in question would eventually provide material for Authoring Action, the documentary Freeman made about program. The film has been screened this year at several film festivals -- including the Swansea Bay Film Festival in Wales, where this past May it won in the category of American documentaries under 100 minutes.

Authoring Action, created in part as a vehicle to attract future students and donors for the program, will also be screened this fall at such festivals as the International Black Film Festival in Nashville and the African Diaspora Film Festival in Harlem. Authoring Action is trying to raise money to take its youth to these events so that they can participate after screenings in question-and-answer sessions about the program and how it might collaborate with educators and others who see the screenings.

The story of how all this happened began not only with those tapes in Freeman's closet but also with a bit of serendipity and more than a bit of determination.

Since 2002, the year that Authoring Action was founded, several cinematographers have shot footage of the organization in action. The cinematographers either served as instructors at Authoring Action, helping kids make films, or they made Authoring Action the subject of their own student projects.

Several of the cinematographers expressed an interest in making a documentary about the program but ultimately found the prospect too daunting. Freeman collected about 180 hours of footage from them, believing that a documentary could be made from it -- just not by him.

"Usually, you have to lock it down or anchor it with a story about someone," he said. "We had all this raw footage that wasn't necessarily interconnected. It was limited to the time and focus of those cinematographers. It was either too much or too disconnected."

When work began on an anthology of Authoring Action pieces, Freeman changed his mind.

"I got the responsibility attack," he said. "I said, ‘I've got to do something.' I said, ‘I'm going to do it.'"

Freeman got down to work that would last many months, downloading the tapes on a computer and dividing up excerpts into various categories. He recalls having to date and describe every piece of footage, always identifying each participant by name and giving their ages at the time the footage was shot. There was also a need to cut out ambient noise and improve lighting. Freeman described as "torture" the decisions he made about which footage to include and which to leave out.

"I don't think people realize how much goes into editing and creating something like this," said Lynn Rhoades, the founding executive director of Authoring Action. "Editing feels like you're writing. You're finding the story in the footage."

In time, Freeman settled on a form that divided the documentary into several sections, with each one exploring a different feature of the program. The features run the gamut, from the techniques Freeman uses to teach writing to the ways in which he adapts writing pieces into a script used for a theatrical presentation. Also explored are the frequent collaborations with guest instructors, such as Frank Eaton (film) and Mabel Robinson (choreography), the artistic director of N.C. Black Repertory Company.

Freeman includes interviews with the teenage authors and filmmakers as well as the faculty who worked with them. He shot the interviews after the documentary's original footage was collected and edited for Authoring Action.

Both the documentary and the anthology were underwritten with a $10,000 matching grant from the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County in 2008. The film -- which required the purchase of additional equipment, including a more powerful and sophisticated computer for editing -- was completed last year. The anthology will likely be published in the fall under the Authoring Action imprint.

Richard Emmett, the council's chief operating officer, said that the film and the anthology will help Authoring Action attract students and donors.

In addition, organizations around the world might wish to pursue a mission similar to Authoring Action's. If so, they can turn to Authoring Action to get a better idea of what Freeman and Rhoades have been doing for several years.

In Freeman's eyes, this boils down to one thing: "Most programs have to do with serving the youth," he said. "We fortify youth to serve the community."

kkeuffel@wsjournal.com
727-7337

To order a copy of Authoring Action, go www.authoringaction.org and click on "Store." To help underwrite appearances by Authoring Action's teen authors at festivals at which Authoring Action is screened, go to http://tinyurl.com/AuthoringAction.