Phoebe Brown

Producer, Mighty Fine Pictures

When most people are considering a career in filmmaking, they all imagine themselves in the same role.

“Everybody wants to be the director,” said Phoebe Brown, a producer at Mighty Fine Pictures. “And there’s one director. So your competition is stiff. But there are 500 people behind the camera, and so many departments to work in.”

Brown would know. When she finished her MFA in photography and digital video production at Georgia State in 2010, her first gigs were as on on-set dresser.

“Your job is really to stand by the monitor and look at the frame, and if something doesn’t look right, you’re the person whose job it is to go in and fix it,” she said. “So you get a lot of contact with the director and the producers. It’s a nice position to be in if you want to pick up more skills as a general filmmaker.”

She used those jobs to build relationships and support the documentary features she’d been working on since she was a graduate student. One of those side projects brought her to Kolkata, India, with Elizabeth Strickler, associate director of Georgia State’s Digital Arts Entertainment Lab. When the two first arrived there five years ago, the subject they’d been pursuing didn’t work out.

“We realized what we wanted to do wasn’t really a documentary,” Brown said. Instead, they started a video production training program—later dubbed “The Cross-Stitch Project”—to teach young girls who were struggling to stay in school how to shoot and edit video.

“We called it ‘cross-stitch’ because we wanted to create dialogue with girls here in Atlanta,” she said.

Students at Trinity Society Kolkata, the Atlanta Girls School and Grady High School collaborated on video assignments and design projects through a private social media platform.

Back in Atlanta, Mighty Fine Pictures, a new boutique agency that does commercial shoots as well as long-form narrative projects, just finished its first feature documentary. Called “The Founders,” it tells the story of the 13 women who founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association.

“Really, it’s an underdog story,” Brown said. “It’s the story of women coming out of the 1940s into the workplace and wanting to find professional opportunities. This happens to be through golf, not because we’re tremendous golf lovers, but because it really was the first professional sports league for women.”

The film will premiere this spring.

—Erin Crews

PANTHERS SHAPING ATLANTA'S FILM INDUSTRY