Some parents dropping off students at Hill Country Middle School may have noticed an extra bright yellow school bus wedged in the school parking lot for the last 13 days. The bus wasn’t waiting to collect students for their trip back home at the end of the day. It was there to facilitate teachers from the John F. Kennedy Center there to train film students at the middle school in story telling, film making, editing and video production using brand new digital media equipment.

HCMS won a spot as one of ten schools in the U.S. to participate in On Location: Spotlight on Your community, a program produced the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Principal Kathleen Sullivan brought the program contest to the attention of film and drama teachers Pam Fletcher and Sarah Cervantes, who helped students send in essays describing the local community and their idea for a documentary film project.

“We chose the DA! Theater Collective because they bring something truly unique and special to Austin,” Cervantes said.

DA! Theatre Collective, sponsored by Hyde Parke Theatre, has performed workshops at the school with production classes in the past.

The documentary produced by the HCMS students will be posted on the onlocationproject.org Web site maintained by the Kennedy Center and shared worldwide. The project award provides equipment, curriculum and $1,000 for ongoing media projects to expand the middle school’s two-year-old film program.

Initially, 21 HCMS film students participated in the project, but teachers will continue the lessons with each new film class, producing two new documentaries a year focusing on the community. Each student was assigned a position in production, story or as part of the audio-video team. They worked in teams, half of them working on story ideas and half of them working on editing, and then they switched positions.

“Making a film is a team effort,” Blackwell said. “Everybody has his position.”

“This program is like an intense three-week field trip,” Cervantes said. “It’s something we wouldn’t have been able to take the kids to, and we are very lucky to have brought to us. It’s hands on training for the kids as well as myself. They learn the process of film making from professional filmmakers. I learn new methods/styles of teaching film – so everybody wins.”

Austin was the second stop on the project tour for Kennedy media teachers Blackwell and Brandon Kramer. Their first stop was a middle school in Muskogee Oklahoma.

Seated in a Thomas Built bus that has been converted into an editing suite, Blackwell worked on a film segment with mesmerized students. She talked to them about what to focus on while manning the camera, how to handle interviews and the importance of background research. She is good at communicating with teenagers, and she likes what she does.

“It is pretty wonderful to be able to see the impact on the students immediately,” she said. “That kind of feedback is nice. They are so proud of what they accomplish, and they should be. It is refreshing.”