Funded with grants from JPMorgan Chase, the CINEMA Program operated by Georgia State’s Alonzo A. Crim Center for Urban Educational Excellence is building the next generation of Atlanta’s film, television and digital arts workforce.
It was a fateful call.
Sitting at a desk at Southerners on New Ground (SONG), a nonprofit LGBTQ social justice and advocacy organization based in southwest Atlanta, N.D. Johnson was working as a communications Fellow when the phone rang.
Taharka Sankara was on the other end of the line. As the director of Georgia State’s Careers in New and Emerging Media Areas (CINEMA) Program, he wanted to know if anyone at SONG knew of any young, aspiring filmmakers or artists interested in learning about and working in Atlanta’s film and television industry.
As it turned out, Johnson was exactly the type of student Sankara was looking for.
“I was literally in the right place at the right time,” Johnson says.
After graduating from high school in Lancaster, Texas, in 2014, Johnson, who identifies by the pronouns they/them, was hoping to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Atlanta. The cost of tuition got in the way, and they went to the University of North Texas instead.
Four years later, after finishing a degree in media and arts management and still hoping to study at SCAD, Johnson moved to Atlanta to live with a cousin but was devastated when they learned they weren’t accepted as a grad student.
Johnson worked at Waffle House to make ends meet but was at a loss as to what to do next and quit.
“Coming out of college, I wanted to try to find a crew of people who wanted to work together to create things, even if it wasn’t for the sake of getting paid,” Johnson says. “It’s a hard thing because people don’t want to work for free, and I totally understand that. I don’t want to work for free either, but I also understand that right now I am building.”
After getting the SONG fellowship and taking the out-of-the-blue phone call from Georgia State, Johnson enrolled in CINEMA’s second cohort and met a group of driven creatives and potential collaborators.
During their time in the program, Johnson was project director for a team that produced eight digital commercials for Invest Atlanta, the City of Atlanta’s economic development agency, highlighting some of the city’s biggest companies.
“It was a wonderful, wonderful experience,” Johnson says. “It really did help push me and push my fellow filmmakers to create and make things.”
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“It’s important to train opportunity youth for the future, and the future is creative, the future is based on code, it’s based on words and it’s based on content. As they say in the industry, content is king, and if you can’t create it, you’re not going to survive."
- Taharka Sankara, director of Georgia State’s Careers in New and Emerging Media Areas (CINEMA) Program
Learning and doing
Over the course of the CINEMA program, students are immersed in film production and visual effects disciplines. Classes include lessons on screenwriting and directing, 3D modeling, digital compositing and animation, and virtual reality. There are even sessions on “soft” skills, like time management.
A workforce development program of the Alonzo A. Crim Center for Urban Educational Excellence in the College of Education & Human Development, CINEMA is focused on opportunity youth — 18- to 24-year-olds not enrolled in school and not fully participating in the labor market.
The classes are taught by experienced professionals in the entertainment industry with established careers in Atlanta — artist managers, entertainment attorneys, 3D modeling experts.
The goal is to teach students the skills they need to take advantage of the vast opportunities available in the entertainment sector in Atlanta and give them the connections they need to make use of those skills. While they’re in the program, students receive a stipend that allows them to focus on their courses and their creativity.
The Crim Center was awarded a $125,000 grant by JPMorgan Chase to design and develop the program in 2018, and the firm later contributed $300,000 to help get CINEMA running with its first round of courses in 2019. In 2020, the Crim Center received another $100,000 from JPMorgan Chase and an $11,000 grant from Crafty Apes VFX, a California-based visual effects company, to continue support for CINEMA.
The program, at its core, is about equity and social justice. Created by Brian Williams, executive director of the Crim Center and a clinical professor in early childhood elementary education, and Dana E. Salter, associate director of the Crim Center, it’s carefully designed for and with underserved communities to remove barriers to career paths.
The mission of the Crim Center itself is to support children and families in urban communities by ensuring educational equality. Established in 1996, the center serves the Southeast as an interdisciplinary outreach, research and educational support hub with programs that also include the Jumpstart early literacy program, the Technology, Engineering, Environment, Math and Science AmeriCorps program, The African American Male Initiative and Girls Who Code.
So far, two cohorts of 20 students each have gone through the CINEMA Program, both in 2019. The program was on hiatus in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic’s limitation on in-person and experiential opportunities, but a new cohort of 10 students is to start the program this fall.
“Each iteration of the program, since it is a film and media program, is called a season,” says Williams. “And we’re getting ready to launch Season 3.”
While the 22-week seasons are underway and even thereafter, Sankara says, CINEMA helps its students gain employment.
“It could be anything from working on-set to working in a production office,” he says. “We’ve had students work as production assistants, graphic designers and social media specialists. They’ve been working on some really cool movies and really cool TV shows.”
Sankara first came to CINEMA as a program coordinator through a graduate research assistantship while working on a master’s degree in African American studies at Georgia State. With his research focused on how African Americans transmit culture through digital media, Sankara’s adviser said he should consider applying to work with the program, which he did for about eight months before becoming its director in 2019.
“It’s important to train opportunity youth for the future, and the future is creative, the future is based on code, it’s based on words and it’s based on content,” Sankara says. “As they say in the industry, content is king, and if you can’t create it, you’re not going to survive.
“I think this program is important because it addresses directly and overtly the disparities in the creative economy.”
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A hub for entertainment
Georgia has had a storied history as a location for television series and movie shoots going back decades. Well-known films like “Deliverance,” “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Cannonball Run” were shot here in the 1970s.
The state established a special film office, led by Lee Thomas (M.A. ’91), in its Department of Economic Development more than 40 years ago to promote Georgia’s emergence as the “Hollywood of the South.”
In 2006, the state began offering what have been described as some of the most enticing tax credits in the country to film, television and commercial producers, leading to a surge in industry activity. “The Vampire Diaries,” “Stranger Things,” and “The Walking Dead” are just a few big names in television to set up shop in Georgia, and the state has been the setting for a number of movies in the Marvel universe.
As of 2018, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia’s film, television and digital entertainment industry had grown to a $9.5 billion industry.
To help train a workforce for the myriad jobs available, the Crim Center developed partnerships with Georgia State’s Creative Media Industries Institute and The Atlanta Film Society, directed by Chris Escobar (B.A. '08, M.A. '13). It created a program that touches on multiple aspects of entertainment production but is taught in such a way that the skills learned are applicable in many fields.
“We know that if you’re doing tech in the film and media industry, a lot of those skills — graphic design, 3D, coding, all of that — can transfer to working in companies outside of the media space,” says Salter. “It was important to us to teach skills in a way that makes them useful across industries.”
Williams says because the program is hosted by Georgia State, and the classes are taught on its campus, CINEMA is able to open doors into the industry for students and teach them the soft skills sought by hiring managers, in addition to the technical skills that can keep them employed.
“We aren’t interested in these kids just getting jobs. We are interested in these kids having careers,” Williams says. “One of the things we found out from talking to people in the industry was they need people to understand how to navigate the profession, how to show up on time and get the work done, and work on projects in the ways that they work. This entire industry is built around an apprentice model. If you know how to learn, you can be successful in it.”
“Being in the CINEMA Program was big for me. It really helped me pin down what it was I wanted to do. I’d never considered voice acting before someone introduced it to me at the CINEMA Program.”
- Ta'Neal Chandler
“Being in the CINEMA Program was big for me. It really helped me pin down what it was I wanted to do. I’d never considered voice acting before someone introduced it to me at the CINEMA Program.”
- Ta'Neal Chandler
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Finding their voices
By the time their enrollment in the CINEMA Program ended, Johnson had found a group of fellow students to continue collaborating with on their own project.
Forming an informal collective, the group produced Johnson’s short film, “Sweetness,” about a Black, transgender woman finding independence. It explores themes of domestic violence, community support, and safety and self-defense.
Johnson is hoping to turn “Sweetness” into their first feature film and expand the concept behind it into other projects, including a program for intergenerational trans women that covers self-defense and civil rights topics. Since CINEMA, Johnson has also gone on to intern at A24 Films.
“I wanted to find other people to build with me, and the CINEMA Program was amazing for that because I found likeminded filmmakers, audio technicians and graphic design artists who all had that same hunger and that same drive,” Johnson says.
While CINEMA is helping students like Johnson realize their ambitions, for students like Ta’Neal Chandler of Mableton, Ga., it’s helping them discover unknown paths.
After attending Woodward Academy through middle school and high school, Chandler earned a bachelor of arts degree in media studies from Pomona (Calif.) College in 2018. But after receiving her degree, she struggled to find her place in the workforce.
“After graduating, I spent the rest of 2018 trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I learned about CINEMA from a family friend and applied,” Chandler says. “I was able to explore screenwriting, cinematography, and there was some digital art in there, which is my forte, so that was exciting. And I could learn more about a specific industry while still being able to dabble.”
Her final project for CINEMA was a short film called “Code Switch” that follows a young Black man as he navigates interactions with different kinds of people, changing his speech patterns and persona to suit the person with whom he’s communicating.
It was through her 3D animation course that Chandler may have found her own voice and the start of a career. After hearing the voiceover she recorded for the class project, Chandler’s instructor encouraged her to consider further training as a voice actor.
Chandler is now recording audio books, and has voiced a character in an audio drama. She also runs a YouTube channel that allows her to continue working in visual arts and voice acting.
“Being in the CINEMA Program was big for me. It really helped me pin down what it was I wanted to do,” she says. “I’d never considered voice acting before someone introduced it to me at the CINEMA Program.”
Photos by Steven Thackston