When Create Action announced Big Picture Alliance as the winner of a Sony Create Action grant, we knew it was a perfect creator match. We’ve been excited to work with them and appreciate their mission to amplify the voices of marginalized youth in Philadelphia by providing them with filmmaking skills from script to screen. “Filmmaking is not just an art form, but it’s like, the process of filmmaking is a way to find yourself and to find your place in the world,” says Aleks Martray, the nonprofit’s executive director. As recipients of the grant, Big Picture Alliance receives $50,000 in cash to continue and expand the organization's work, $50,000 in Sony Electronics products to support their action plan, and this Sony-produced short film telling their story.
See how Create Action grant winner Big Picture Alliance works to cultivate new generations of storytellers toward a more equitable society.
The mission of Big Picture Alliance is to empower Philadelphia youth to define their own narrative through filmmaking and digital media arts. “Here at Big Picture, our students get to do filmmaking from top to bottom,” explains Gianna Brown, a teaching artist with the nonprofit. “So they learn how to write a script, they learn how to write a treatment. They learn how to use the equipment, they learn how to edit the footage.”
The nonprofit amplifies marginalized voices, annually serving hundreds of Philadelphia youth (ages 12-24) from marginalized communities who lack access to media education. “We need storytellers from all backgrounds,” says Martray. “Not only behind the camera but in front of the camera, in the editing lab, in the producer’s room, in the writer’s room.”
Big Picture Alliance offers a pathway of school, summer and workforce programs that provide youth with the tools they need to tell their own stories and the skills they need to succeed in school, life and career. Through partnerships with schools, industry and cultural institutions, Big Picture Alliance brings project-based programs into classrooms and communities across Philadelphia.
“So when we design these curriculums,” explains Eli Laban, another teaching artist with Big Picture Alliance, "we’re bringing our real experiences that we’ve had as creative professionals and freelancers, and turning that into a structured curriculum to really help our students be prepared for what it’s like to be a creative now.”
Big Picture Alliance continues to cultivate new generations of storytellers toward a more equitable society. “And in the long term,” explains Martray, “what that is really meant to do, is to contribute to a more diverse, equitable, inclusive film and media community here, and also industry, broadly speaking.”
Learn more about Big Picture Alliance at bigpicturealliance.org.
Stay tuned to Alpha Universe for future news and learn more about Create Action and our past grant recipients HERE.
