Finding Ma

Overview

Project Partner: Finding Ma

As representatives of UC Santa Cruz and The Everett Program, our goal was to support Thanh Tran during the period of production and development for his biographical documentary. Storytelling is a powerful medium to help transcend borders and nations, but one that can be overlooked in this day and age of mass global information. At the heart of Finding Ma, we have a family, a connection, and a local hero who stands for a better future. Lights, Camera, Community was a project intended to spread Thanh's message and anticipation for his film through the power of social media.

To learn more, please visit @findingmafilm

Project Description

Tech Tools Used: Adobe Premiere Pro and Canva

After ten years of enduring incarceration, Thanh Tran is ready to share his experience with incarceration itself and how it has impacted his family, friends, and support networks. He aims to shed light on this associative relationship and bring a sense of understanding to this world. Lights, Camera, Community chose to aid his documentary, Finding Ma, by providing various film equipment, such as cameras, lighting fixtures, external hard drives, and professional editing software. Our main focus was creating a social media campaign through Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter in order to encourage engagement with the film.

Project Deliverables

To achieve our goal, we used social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube with bite-size informatics, a combination of video storytelling, and social media engagement tools to share the stories of Thanh and his family as they embark on their journey of reuniting with their biological mother. This served as a powerful tool for raising awareness about the experiences of families affected by foster care and incarceration. We also used event planning software and marketing tools, such as Canva, MailChimp, and Adobe Illustrator to effectively promote and host our in-person events. In between days of production, our team continued to support the documentary with a strategic distribution of tasks for grant applications, documentary labs, and video editing.

Project Outcomes

Throughout the course of the project, we achieved many great tasks that left an impact on the course of production. Our largest impact was garnering a 100% growth on the Finding Ma Instagram page since last year. We aided in developing content for multiple platforms as well as editing content for the actual film itself. This was done through the editing software Adobe Premiere Pro and Canva.

Project Milestones

Our first and largest milestone was sending the team out to Oakland in order to shoot a two-hour long interview of the producers of Finding Ma describing their stories and process of production. We continued on with formulating a plan for edits, and released our first round of edits shortly after. Finishing up content in October, we finished the full edit of the video and uploaded it to YouTube.

Lessons Learned

Heads

This project was my first time fully integrating myself into a community and giving back to it over an extended period of time. Through this project, I understood what a “deficit-based” approach means and how to avoid going into communities to help because you feel that they are “broken”. This experience taught me to see the power in communities and how to help uplift them.

The social problem I encountered throughout this project was how many issues in combination can set communities back. Our director was faced with the foster care system from a young age, but he also had a mother who was in active addiction and who is now houseless. This was eye-opening because these factors led him down a path that would lead to his incarceration. It is important to understand that people who are marginalized often go through different layers and problems that add to their marginalization in society.

Hands

The problems that tech alone could not solve are the actual core issue of the foster-care-to-prison pipeline. Our project did not span so far as to help fix the actual system itself. However, we can help one organization at a time which helps the community over time.

People who are impacted by the system can see Thanh Tran’s success and feel inspired. The biggest lesson I learned during the process of learning and creating tech is that saving is everything. You must save things in multiple safe places in order to not lose content. We lost a good amount of footage because we did not have backups in case something went wrong, and unfortunately, something did go wrong! An update I can share is that we recovered the footage we thought we lost. We would not have had a problem with missing footage for months, however, if we had safeguards in place.

Hearts

My partner organization was very efficient at creating a fair and equal team dynamic. I did not feel intimidated by Thanh at any point and felt that I was able to reach out to him freely. He would, and still does, reply openly and honestly which I appreciate.

I felt that my project guides were also helpful. At times, I felt a bit left astray, because there were not many check-ins, reminders, and deadlines set which made me feel like the project was barely picking up. It felt more talk than action at some points. As for the actual team itself, I felt that we had a good dynamic until we didn’t. I thought that we were all on the same page and felt dedicated to the project. However, that was unfortunately not the case. I am unsure of how this could have been fixed. I do believe that team bonding is incredibly important and I would emphasize that next time for anyone who is struggling with collaboration and team dynamics.

UCSC Team

Lili Grigoryan (she/her)

Sociology with GISES minor | 2025

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