Next Steps: Teaching art through craft with its own film production company
Nearly an hour after the final bell at the career and technical education (CTE) high school in Long Island City last February, the senior honors production class was still hard at work on a film set. Around 20 students at the Academy for Careers in Television & Film reset props, mics and cameras. Two middle-aged actors stepped onto their marks. One student handed the actors props for their next scene: a replica gun, a pair of handcuffs and a cigarette.
The film under production, “Chicago Plantation,” is a documentary about the unsolved 1963 murder of a Chicago alderman. The students were hired by the producer to film re-enactments of key historical scenes.
“Remember you never, never give a gun to an actor until the very last minute,” Alan Metzger, the school’s director of production, cautioned from the back of the room. A sea of heads nodded knowingly.
“Is this a real cigarette?” one actor whispered to the student who’d just handed it to him. The boy assured him that it was not.
“Quiet on the set!” said Shannon Jamieson, a senior who was assistant director that afternoon. The room hushed. Without further direction, the students transformed from laid back teenagers to crisp professionals.
“Roll sound,” Jamieson said. “Roll camera. Slate.”
“Chicago Murders, Scene One, Take Two,” her classmate responded, clicking the slate in front of the camera. The actors began their scene.
The Academy for Careers in Television and Film is the rare New York City public high school where students routinely manage professional film sets. The city’s 300 Career and Technical Education high schools are all designed to integrate work with learning. But ACTvF takes that mandate to the next step, preparing its 565 majority low-income students for work in the burgeoning $5 billion film industry by creating its own non-profit production company.
Next Step Pictures, which was created the year the school opened its doors in 2008, blends professional experience with a rigorous production curriculum. In addition to sending the students out to other production companies for hands-on experience through internships, the school brings clients into the school itself through its own production company. “The program is really unique,” said Metzger, a founding school administrator. “It’s not being offered anywhere else.”
That afternoon’s Next Step job was for the true-crime documentary directed by Joe Kolman, the parent of a recent alum. Kolman had hired Next Step to film a re-enactment of the murder investigated in his documentary. As soon the contract was finalized in January, the students got to work.
“When my son was here, I had seen what the kids could do,” said Kolman. “I knew it would be a great fit.”
Using a vintage newspaper photograph of the crime, the senior design class spent two weeks constructing a set in one of the classrooms at their 51st Avenue school building in Long Island City. By February, the senior honors production class was ready to shoot the reenactment. After the shoot, the senior post-production class edited the scene and delivered a finished clip to use in the upcoming documentary.
The school’s approach to film education is not only unique to city public schools, but it also differs from many in higher education programs at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, the School of Visual Arts, and Columbia University.
“They’re really training directors and producers and writers,” said Metzger of the university programs. “They’re not training below the line,” he added, using industry lingo for a film production’s crew.
For the vocational side of the school’s curriculum, technique is everything. Students get broad training with production equipment and in documentary-style filmmaking in their freshman and sophomore years. In their junior year, they declare an “area of concentration” such as grip and electric, sound, camera, and production design, among others. Senior students hone their skills in their chosen track in targeted classes, while getting work-based experience through internship placements and through in-house jobs from Next Step Pictures.
The idea to create an in-house production company was Metzger’s, and was born from anticipated necessity when the school first opened its doors. The school was founded in 2008 under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration, which supported expanding the city’s vocational offerings. CTEs in the New York City public school system require a work-based learning component, and schools often fulfill that commitment by placing successful juniors and seniors in internships or apprenticeships that fit the school’s trade. Some of the city’s 300-plus vocational schools have longstanding partners such as with the Museum of Modern Art, for example, or British Airways.
The founders of The Academy for Careers in Television and Film were committed to work-based learning, but were not sure at first how to do it. For one thing, they had no existing partners. Metzger had worked in the film industry for decades before career-switching to public education.
“The business is really a glamour business, we’re competing with colleges, and there’s not really that much work around,” Metzger said, recalling his concerns. He worried that ACTvF would not be able to secure placements for high school students.
Plus, a vocational education focused on film production was entirely new in the city’s public schools. New York has no shortage of arts-based high schools such as LaGuardia (a public school that selects through audition) or Juilliard (a private conservatory). But those schools lacked film-specific programs — and tended to train artists as opposed to crew members.
“We were really learning as we went,” said principal Edgar Rodriguez, who began as the founding vice principal in 2008 until he took the helm in 2013. “There was really no reference point that we could look at, educationally, in terms of what kids of this age could do.”
Metzger resolved to come up with a solution. By the time the inaugural class reached graduation, work-based learning would be required. When ACTvF’s first 9th-grade class arrived in 2008, Metzger noticed right away that the students had an “appetite” for documentary and producing movies in real-world contexts. Thus the in-school production company idea was born.
Instead of sending students to fetch coffee during internships at established companies, Metzger reasoned, ACTvF could form its own company where students could see jobs through from start to finish. He decided Next Step should be a non-profit, so they could bill clients (and reimburse staff and students for time spent on those projects) outside of the constraints of a public school’s general budget, which is tightly monitored by the city’s education department.
These days, Metzger said, students can get paid up to $25 per hour for Next Step jobs that are not part of their for-credit academics. Teachers who stay on to supervise are paid $45, a fee comparable to working overtime teaching hours.
Rodriguez and Metzger’s initial fears about film industry internships were actually proven wrong. They were able to find local studios willing to take high school interns. In the past decade, the school has placed more than 120 of its students in competitive internships at New York City film and broadcast companies including WNET, Panavision, and Timberlake Studios.
But Next Step Pictures, which incorporated as non-profit in 2009, has continued to exist and play a vital role in supplementing the school’s curriculum. “Kids sit around the table and go through the process of producing media for an organization from beginning to end, and actually [are] the ones to produce,” Rodriguez explained. That’s an experience that most aspiring producers will not encounter before many years of higher education, or working in the industry.
In the past decade, students have produced dozens of polished, professional films for clients. Their recent projects include a commercial for a local sculpture park, open house videos for other area high schools hoping to attract new students, and the documentary reenactment for Kolman.
Next Step is not a significant revenue stream for the school. The non-profit brought in $40,000 in revenue between January 2017 and December 2018, which is about .5 percent of the annual operating budget. But having an incorporated non-profit company allows the school to charge clients for the students’ work.
Those fees are not astronomical: Metzger estimated they charge an average of $4,000 to 5,000 per contract. The price is set according to the amount that is needed to cover student transport and food during shoots, wear and tear on the school’s filming equipment, and hourly pay for teachers who stay after-hours to supervise. The goal is not to make a profit, but to break even and continue to be able to provide students with an extra venue for work-based learning.
Rodriguez noted that having a non-profit entity was useful in more ways than one. For example, the school can choose to apply for and accept grant funding or donations through Next Step, so long as the funding is specific to Next Step’s mission of creating “work experiences for [ACTvF] students in visual media production and to support the successful transition of these students into entry-level employment and post-secondary studies.” That’s just another way that he and the administrative staff can try to keep the budget as efficient as possible, he said.
“The assumption for everyone is that we must have so much money in alternative funding,” Rodriguez admitted, gesturing around their new school building on Long Island City’s waterfront, which the city completed six years ago. “And we don’t,” he added for clarity.
The building has floor-to-ceiling cafeteria windows that face the Manhattan skyline, and looks more like an elite private school campus — or a start-up — than the average New York City vocational school. On ACTvF’s floors, rooms are stocked with hundreds of thousands of dollars of film and editing equipment.
The Academy shares with two other public schools. The equipment was purchased from the school’s operating budget, and painstakingly maintained over the years. Rodriguez credits the school’s investment in high-quality teachers, counselors and equipment technicians with keeping the school functioning.
As for extra perks such as college visits, after-school meals during shoots, and transport to off-campus production projects? That’s where Next Step Pictures steps in.
The Academy for Careers in Television and Film’s success rate is reflected in its official numbers. It is more successful than the average city high school by every tracked metric, even while maintaining a relatively diverse student body in terms of family income and race. Fifty-one percent of ACTvT’s students come from families with incomes below the federal poverty line; 55 percent of its students are Hispanic, 20 percent are white, 12 percent are black and 6 percent are Asian.
The school has a four-year graduation rate of 99 percent compared to 76 percent citywide, and 80 percent of its graduates are “college ready” compared to 51 percent across the public school system. That’s despite the fact that ACTvF does not select its students as other high schools do. Its lack of selective admissions criteria bucks the trend of the city’s more successful (and typically majority white and Asian) public high schools.
The school does not yet have the capacity to track whether its students actually go to work in the film industry after graduating, however. After all, film is a “freelance industry,” in Metzger’s words, with many people coming and going, or working multiple jobs before landing on their feet. The school encourages all students to apply to college and has an 84 percent college matriculation rate within six months of graduating — nearly unheard of in a public school system that averages 59 percent.
But the school’s technical training, Metzger said, prepares students for real-world work regardless of industry. And for students who do decide to pursue film, graduating from ACTvF guarantees a bottom-up understanding of the realities of production.
“It is a real nuts and bolts approach,” Metzger said. “Art, through craft.”
