CineMagic / Lift-Off
February 2025  // Season 3 

When Syracuse community member, basketball player, and youth mentor John Bol first joined a workshop session of Teens with a Movie Camera, bringing along a cohort of teens he mentors, he was introduced to the magic of a 19th century optical toy known as a phenakistoscope—which became a jumping off point for the below short movie, "LEAPFROG." 

Stop motion animation deals directly with the optical illusion at the heart of motion pictures—a magic trick which allows still images to come to life. As always at our workshops, teens were greeted by an assortment of fruits, veggies, and other everyday "kitchen table props" that lent themselves for creative moviemaking. Experienced teen filmmakers from previous rounds of TwMC assisted in showing new, first-time teen filmmakers how to bring inanimate objects to life with the free Stop Motion Studio app. 

After the first two weeks of Workshop 3.0, TwMC hosted a major event as part of the 2025 Syracuse Symposium, on the theme of "Community Cinema." At this screening, we premiered a new 30-minute cut of our "Visions of Community" TeenReel from TwMC 2, which also integrated material from TwMC 1, illustrating our hands-on research into collaborative cinematic expression as a form of community-building.  

At the same event, we also debuted three new "CineMagic" pieces created in-workshop by teens the previous Friday, including the one below, which at the time, was silent (the audience helped us by producing the soundtrack).  

Inspired by Carl Sagan's "Golden Record," the same Symposium Event introduced a "cosmic perspective" by asking participants to write down Messages to Mars: how would you describe the community of Syracuse to an extraterrestrial who had never visited our planet before? The topic of adventures in outer space continued to shape generative prompts for the next four weeks of workshop—encouraging reflection not only on the great unknown beyond us, but also putting our life on the "Pale Blue Dot" of Planet Earth into a different light.

When describing Syracuse to extraterrestrials, our wintery weather is one of the first traits mentioned. One day during workshop, when we looked outside the window at Light Work to see a fresh flurry of snowfall, the perfect opportunity to capture this weather presented itself. 

To work on editing the video above, dedicated participants Nola and Leo (members of the group since TwMC 1) agreed to meet on an extra day outside of workshop with Evan at Bird Library, gaining additional enrichment and practice with video editing. 

When the opportunity arrived for our group to create a documentary about another Engaged Humanities Network youth group called Write Out,  Nola and Leo embraced the challenge — highlighting another fantastic youth arts program in our local "network of neighbors" and embarking on TwMC's first externally commissioned project, seen below. 

While members of Write Out were cutting paper to create colorful collages of found poetry, members of Teens with a Movie Camera were cutting paper to create extraterrestrial puppets of all shapes and sizes. The footage below showcases an initial attempt to navigate social interaction in an alien language, transforming conflict into friendship, while experimenting with light, shadow, color, paper puppetry, and improvisational storytelling. 

After playing with creative storytelling possibilities during workshop, teen moviemakers are encouraged to go home and continue to do cinematic experiments on their own (through optional outside "FunJoys"—not homework). Below are a compilation of 3 FunJoys that were created from home by Nola and Leo, reflecting on the moon in the night sky. 

Our space explorations in TwMC 3 culminated in the creative montage "LIFT-OFF,"  for which teen participants had to overcome a seemingly impossible challenge: how can we reach outer space, from here on the ground? Through imagination and collaboration, young moviemakers portrayed a cinematic trip to the moon using everyday materials like paper, light, shadow, and projectors.  

This project is made possible through the CNY Arts Grants for Regional Arts and Cultural Engagement regrant program thanks to a New York State Senate Initiative supported by the NYS Legislature, the Office of the Governor and administered by the New York State Council on the Arts.