Make a Scene WA – 2023 Accelerator Case Study
Make A Scene WA
Organization Name: Make A Scene WA
Budget Size: Between 50k and 100k
Region: Northwest
County: Whatcom
Mission Statement: Make A Scene WA empowers girls & teens through the art of filmmaking.
Community Accelerator Grant Award: $23,800
Primary Impact Category: Financial Impact
Website: https://www.makeascenewa.com/
Elena Rodriquez Stecca shows up to festivals, fairs, and other community events across Northern Washington with her trusty green screen in tow. “Families make short videos together – set in space, or underwater, or wherever – and I send them out the next day,” she told us. “That’s definitely gotten me students.”
This level of resourcefulness is par for the course for Elena, the founder of Make A Scene WA. At her school, roughly 20 students per year, aged 9-17, conceptualize, film, and edit their own projects from start to finish, often making use of readily accessible materials and equipment (such as their cell phones). While many classes are open to students of all genders, Make A Scene is specifically interested in empowering girls through filmmaking, a mission born of Elena’s lived experience as a woman in the film industry.
“I’ve been in filmmaking for more than ten years now, and I’ve found I’m often the only woman doing crew work. I started thinking, ‘Okay, why is that?’”
Elena Rodriguez Stecca, Founder of Make A Scene WA
When she reached out to production companies and filmmakers, she heard the same thing again and again: they would love to work with more women, but the only people they knew with the experience to succeed in the jobs they were hiring for were men. (The numbers back Elena up – The Celluloid Ceiling’s 2023 Annual Report found that only 24% of directors, writers, producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing films of the last year were women.)
Make A Scene intends to break the cycle by creating an educational, confidence-building environment for young filmmakers to experiment, problem-solve, and gain experience that will help them thrive on movie sets or anywhere else they might choose to go. Make A Scene is based in Bellingham, a city which is quietly becoming a hub for both professional and indie filmmakers, due in large part to its convenient location between the established film scene in Vancouver, B.C. and the growing film scene in Seattle. Community Accelerator Grant funding has supported Make A Scene by resourcing a new mentorship program pairing aspiring young filmmakers with local women in the film industry, as well as supporting sound and lighting equipment upgrades that Elena says will allow students to create higher-caliber work. Community Accelerator Grant Funding is also offsetting the costs of reconfiguring Make A Scene’s programming for in-classroom use at Bellingham High and other schools, building long-term partnerships that will more than double the school’s reach. Over the next few years, Elena hopes to bring Make A Scene to more schools, grow summer camp and workshop enrollment numbers, and help her students tackle bigger and more challenging films – and, perhaps, she’ll even hire a second staff member.
In Tandem is a short film by Make A Scene’s most recent student cohort. It follows a group of girls who dream of enlivening their summer break with tandem bicycles. This project recently tied for first place at the Storyteller’s Seasonal at Pickford Film Center.