Before being accepted by the Colorado Springs-based Youth Documentary Academy for its 2024 class, 18-year-old Cristian Perez didn’t have much experience with making films.
“I made a documentary about different types of mental illnesses with one of my friends,” Perez says of a project he made for a social studies class. “I got an OK score, but I think I could have done a lot more.”
Perez immigrated to Colorado from Honduras 11 years ago and loves studying other cultures and reading books. He loves movies and documentaries for their realism and truth in storytelling, so it follows that his favorite movie is 2002 Brazilian crime film “City of God.”
“I think it’s just how realistic it is and how grounded the characters are, how realistic they feel, the atmosphere,” Perez says.
As a junior attending Mitchell High School last April, he heeded the announcement that YDA was accepting new applicants for their 2024 summer class. In an interview process over Zoom that he says was a bit of a blur, Perez was accepted into the intensive 7-week filmmaking program. He joined 12 others in what would become YDA’s largest class yet.
YDA is the brainchild of award-winning documentary filmmaker Tom Shepard. Raised in Colorado Springs but educated in the San Francisco Bay Area, Shepard dreamt of creating a program here in Colorado that would enable local high school-aged filmmakers to produce PBS-quality documentaries.
Now in its 11th year, the program’s students have produced several award-winning films, shaping the trajectories of many of its participants who had never considered making films before. Their documentaries have addressed complicated and sensitive issues such as parental estrangement, veteran PTSD and living with a visual impairment.
Perez’s film – which will debut Nov. 16 at the YDA’s premiere event at the Edith Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center – addresses homelessness through the efforts of Homeward Pikes Peak, a nonprofit that helps the unhoused exit homelessness here in Colorado Springs.
“I go to parks, and I always see homeless people. I was so curious about their situation, and I asked some of them, and their situations were so different,” Perez says.
While many students rely on telling personal stories from their own first-person perspective, Perez leaned on the documentaries he loved and sought to make a third-person narrative.
“I wanted to make it about other people, not me,” Perez says. “Homelessness affects so many other people.”
YDA classmate Ellie White sounds mature beyond her years. While still too young to vote, she speaks passionately about social justice and engaging the humanities while on fall break from St. Mary’s Academy in Englewood. She’s pondering college and majoring in “something like” political science, but she also just loves storytelling.
“My sister and I kind of grew up making iMovies: these crazy stories that we’d come up with,” White says. “It kind of grew into a bigger passion … so my mom’s like, ‘Okay, let’s get you some equipment.'”
As a teenager armed with a Sony camera and wireless microphones, she produced short informational videos for Denver-based nonprofits like League of Women Voters Denver and the Colorado Hosting Asylum Network. For Denver Tennis Park, which benefits socioeconomically disadvantaged players, she says she got to stand before an audience of about 500 people at a fundraising event and present a short film she produced.
“I was looking up programs to help me develop [my storytelling] skill further and work with professionals and people who knew what they were doing, so I came across YDA,” White says. “I hadn’t realized … not how big the program was, but the breadth of what they’ve done over the past 10 years and how world-renowned the people are that teach there.”
White was accepted into the program and faced the unique logistical challenge of commuting to Colorado Springs for the three weekly classes as the first YDA student from the Denver area.
“I spent a lot of time in the car this summer,” she says.
White wasn’t quite sure what kind of film she would make in the program – many of her fellows didn’t, she says. But this year, YDA would enlist a new staffer to help students develop their stories.
Guiding young storytellers
Ashley Cornelius is a local creative fixture and champion of mental health. A spoken word artist, Cornelius is the Pikes Peak Poet Laureate, the co-director of Poetry719 and a Licensed Professional Counselor. Having met Shepard a few years ago, Cornelius has also served as the emcee for YDA’s annual premieres.
In a seasonal capacity, YDA brought in Cornelius to help the students develop their ideas into stories.
“I was supporting … how to create narrative arcs and how to incorporate poetry and metaphor into their work,” Cornelius says. “I also did the icebreakers and helped set the tone for the class. A lot of the workshops helped them figure out visually how they wanted to tell a story and many of the filmmakers incorporated some type of poetry into their documentaries, which was really lovely.”
Perez was a big fan.
“[Ashley] gave us all a paper, and it said, ‘Describe your upcoming documentary in five different ways,’ like, ‘If your documentary was a taste, what would it taste like, or what would it sound like? How would it feel?'”
Through their workshops, Cornelius was able to channel the interests and lived experiences of the 13 filmmakers in a way that respected the need to delicately understand traumas and tell stories about them.
“Sometimes we think sharing the most traumatic parts of our story is the way that people are going to win awards or get noticed,” Cornelius says. “And so, a lot of the work was, ‘Here’s your story. What are the parts that you feel comfortable sharing? How can you share some of the big parts through metaphor? What’s the safest way for you to be able to process this and what do you want to share with the world?'”
In these early classes, White shaped her project. She’d considered a couple other concepts before settling on one she hadn’t anticipated: the eating disorder that she was nine months into recovering from.
“Initially, I was like, ‘Absolutely not. I’m not doing my film on this,'” White says. “I hadn’t told any of my friends. The only people I knew were like my therapist and my immediate family and so it had been something that was really secretive for me, partially because I’m kind of a perfectionist … We had these circles discussing possible topics. People were getting really vulnerable, and I realized that YDA could be a space where I could let that guard down, take that mask off and show my true self.”
“I don’t know too much about film or lighting or anything, but I got invited to some of the shoots and [I was] really just there to cheer folks on,” Cornelius says. “It was a real honor to be there in the capacity and an advocate if big [emotional] things were going to happen and just offer that support.”
Perez and White both enjoyed the process of learning the equipment, how to compose shots, and how to piece together a project from shot footage rather than shooting footage to fit a project. Through the YDA program, students aren’t just gaining a perspective on how teams come together to make films but gain perspective on their subjects. They learned how all of those things come together to serve a singular purpose: telling a story.
“I learned how hard it is to actually get housing,” Perez says of his experience exploring local homelessness and how being unable to access the internet and technology hinders those efforts. “I also learned how [unhoused] people use drugs not just to use drugs, [but] to stay up at night, and it’s impacted me so much.”
Shepard and the YDA team have spent over a decade building a local creative institution. Young creatives here in Colorado don’t need to go all the way to the coasts or big metropolitan areas to learn about filmmaking. And they have results, whether their students’ documentary shorts are being shown on PBS via their program “Our Time,” winning awards at the All-American High School Film Festival in New York City or kicking off a national conversation about mental health.
“I think it’s really cool to know that young people in Colorado Springs are able to share their stories and learn a really cool skill,” Cornelius says. “These stories get to go all over.”
Neither student says they’re rushing head-long into a full filmmaking career because of their time with YDA, but it’s helped them better understand themselves and the world they live in.
“Before I met [the unhoused], I didn’t understand their plight. Now I can really understand and maybe I can walk up to the person and offer them something,” Perez says. “Maybe I can help them out by volunteering in the community. I can see them as a person much more now. I love that.”
INFO BOX
World Premiere of New Films by the Youth Documentary Academy
Edith Kinney Gaylord
Cornerstone Arts Center
825 North Cascade Avenue
Sat, Nov 16, 3-9:30 p.m.
Tickets $15-$75 at
tinyurl.com/YDAPremiere
