In This Day and Age, Everyone’s a Director

Matt Brutacao was a sophomore in high school when he wrote, shot, directed and edited “Stealing Can Be Murder,” a two-hour action-adventure movie with an original score and more than 80 cast members. He filmed it over nine months in about 30 locations, including his school bus and the local jail--where a friend’s father worked--and premiered it in his school’s gym. His total cost was $130.

What’s even more stunning than the budget is that Brutacao has made about 100 movies since he first picked up a video camera. He made “The Green Hornet Movie” when he was in third grade; by the time he was 10, he was shooting short films and submitting them as school assignments instead of writing essays. By 12, he had scripted an Indiana Jones sequel, which he filmed one year later and financed by charging each actor $5 for the opportunity to play a part.

“Stealing Can Be Murder” is the centerpiece of “A Career Retrospective,” Brutacao’s campy, 11-minute documentary that screened last weekend at the third annual Doubletake Documentary Film Festival here. Brutacao, now 20 and a second-year American studies student at Stanford, is part of a growing number of teens and young adults who are using inexpensive and easy-to-use video cameras to create short films and documentaries about their own lives and what they see in the world around them. Teen life was a theme of Doubletake and in one part of the festival films by teens themselves were shown.

“Kids are being trained earlier and earlier to use cameras,” said Nancy Buirski, the festival’s founder and director. “I think it’s going to make adults think twice about the way [young people] are portrayed.”

While some adults today can remember a time when their homes didn’t have a television, most teens would be hard-pressed to recall a time when they didn’t have a video camera. Many of them have grown up watching themselves on the small screen.

“Ever since the first day I was born, the camera’s always been on me, and that’s really cool,” said Sonia Hazard, a 13-year-old from St. Paul, Minn., who started making films last year, including contributing to a documentary, “Tiger Jack,” shown at the festival. “It’s just really interesting to have so much power in your hands when you have a video camera. No one’s stopping you from what you can do with it.”

Mike Hazard, Sonia’s father, is an artist who teaches video production to sixth-graders. He first handed Sonia the family camera when she was 4 because, he said, “We have been inundating [kids] with stuff to look at and to see and to hear, but we’ve been a little slow in giving them the tools to make [things], and they are hungry for it. We’re always underestimating children.

“I had one little 10-year-old come up to me and say, ‘Thank you for letting us use the camera. No one ever lets us use the camera,’ ” added Hazard, whose student-produced documentary on a town eccentric, “Tiger Jack,” was shown at Doubletake.

Technical Aptitude From an Early Age

Children today are more technologically savvy than ever before. Many of them learn how to operate remote controls before they can count or spell. Growing up around computers, they exhibit a technical aptitude that was absent in earlier generations, conference participants noted. When Sonia was 12 and working on her first documentary about the history of motion pictures, she edited it with “some old 1970s thing” used by the school system. This year she’s using a Macintosh Avid cinema system. She says it took her 45 minutes to learn how to operate the software.

Other young filmmakers rely on more primitive techniques to pull their films together, like in-camera editing, which involves taping over botched segments. Others, like Durham, N.C., high school students Peter Hart and Dylan Angell, wire together two VCRs to dub segments from one tape onto another and import background music from a CD player.

‘It’s hard to make a movie that will change people’s lives without really good editing equipment,” lamented Hart, 17, who plans to hone his movie-making skills at film school this fall.

It is also hard to change people’s lives without a means for distribution. Like Hart, many teenagers find their only audience is friends. That may change as broadband becomes more widely available, allowing them to screen films on the Internet, and as more schools build video production into their curriculum. Responding to a call for student submissions from a local CBS News affiliate, Espanola Valley High School in Espanola, N.M., launched a television production class in 1992 with a single video camera. The school now owns 10, as well as lights, microphones and four editing machines.

‘Great Democratization of Who Can Do What’

“Things that were once available to only a few people are becoming accessible to everybody in many ways. It’s a great democratization of who can do what, and that’s good,” said Ellen Kaiper, who has been teaching the Espanola Valley class for eight years. She said her students’ movies, which they write, film and edit themselves, regularly appear on statewide television news. Four of them have even won local Emmys, including “Tim Roybal: Master Woodcarver,” a documentary that also ran at the Doubletake festival.

“Most schoolwork doesn’t encourage visual thinking, but with all the media around, kids have learned to plan a show that’s going to be visual, that’s going to work for TV. They know they have an audience, and that seems to bring out the best in them,” said Kaiper, whose class produces about 22 segments each month on topics ranging from drunk driving to lowriders.

Lauren Lazin is vice president and executive producer of MTV’s news and documentaries division, which co-presented this year’s Doubletake festival. She said the channel regularly incorporates teen-produced films into its programming. “It’s a part of the fabric of all the storytelling we do--at some point, the kids film themselves,” she said.

“[Kids] are much more savvy today. They bring new ideas to the medium that make us reinvent what we do. Part of the reason we’ve been successful is because we’ve let them take the lead.”

A segment of “Express Yourself,” an MTV documentary that screened during the festival, included footage from a girl who dyed her hair blue in defiance of a new school rule. Anticipating trouble, she brought a video camera to school to document school officials’ reactions.

“The camera is power. It’s demanding respect. It’s saying, ‘I’m giving a visual and a voice to something that has a purpose,’ ” said Serena Altschul, the host and producer of many MTV news programs. “There’s something about telling your story, especially if you don’t feel you have much of a voice otherwise.”

In light of the shootings one year ago at Colorado’s Columbine High School--the inspiration for this year’s film festival--the camera is becoming a much-needed creative outlet for teens who feel robbed of their means for self-expression. “The tragedies in the last year have been a real wake-up call. We’re not really listening to our young people. We’re not hearing their voices. We’re not understanding their lives,” Lazin said.

“The baby boom generation, who are kind of running the media, feel that they still own the voice of young America,” she added. “But there’s another generation coming along and we’ve got to hear them.”

One of the most well-attended events of the weekend was a Youth Symposium, which included filmmakers Joel Schumacher and Alan Berliner (who curated this year’s festival); MTV producers Altschul and Lazin; and two teenagers, one of whom was Andrea Piskora, an 18-year-old high school senior from New York.

Piskora said she is tired of the way teens are portrayed in movies and on television. “The characters aren’t true,” she said. “My best friend [doesn’t sleep] with her teacher on the second day of school. My best friend [doesn’t come] out to me two weeks later. They’re concentrating on these big issues, and that’s not what a lot of teenagers think about.”

Like many of her peers, she plans to do something about it. She is currently writing her own television show.