Bruno Ferreira - Project Proposal

Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on the street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murder serving a life sentence? – Wes Moore

That is how Dan DeNose started his explanation as to what his organization; “Leaders of the 21st Century” aims to be. Dan is a black graduate student at Rutgers Newark, and he is currently working on his final “research paper”, in order to graduate. The reason for the air quotes is because technically, Dan isn’t doing a research paper on non-profit organizations like most people in his classmates. Instead, with the approval of the school board via the words: “It’s crazy and no one’s ever done it, but you can try,” Dan is making one.

You see, Dan can very much relate to the story above. He was born and raised in a not-so-friendly neighborhood and had friends who were just like him. However, whereas those friends never really got opportunities to become scholars, Dan was able to join a type of military-esq program that eventually led to him being taken in by a white family in a much nicer neighborhood. “It’s almost like the plot to The Fresh Prince,” he described to me. Although grateful, Dan was bothered by the fact that he was given that life changing opportunity and not his friends. This is the inspiration behind LOT21C.

LOT21C is an organization currently in the making.  Its mission is to “create a strong network of leaders to cultivate professional opportunities with one another, provide professional and leadership development to youth participants, and to increase our leadership involvement within our respected communities.” In a nutshell, Dan is trying to create a place where the “have nots” gain a chance to “have.” LOT21C will implement a curriculum in which to prepare young leaders with “principals taken from research and insight from around the world” by offering education, civic engagement, leadership skills and mentorship.

My job is to document Dan and his attempt to create this organization. It may seem like a long shot, but, from my meetings with him, I can tell that Dan is determined to see it through. Filming will start the week of October 12th and will cover meetings with potential members, children, and mentors, his final presentation of his organization to his class, and a big networking event that he is planning, in which he hopes to get people together and see what LOT21C has to offer. There are still many things to be determined with this project. Because Dan is just starting to get the ball rolling, the outcome isn’t necessarily clear. My goal is to create a piece on a man and his attempt to start an organization. I am hoping it brings out topics of society and how organizations such as LOT21C are needed and could prove to be extremely beneficial. However, I am unsure of what exactly I am going to capture on film, so this does have the potential to become a smaller promotional piece for the organization (or both!).

The target audience could be the children intended to join LOT21C, its potential mentors, or potential investors. I, as a filmmaker, want this to be something that I can submit to film festivals. Other forms of distribution would be Vimeo and the LOT21C website. I’m unsure of what the narrative will be, but I do want to try to capture one. Right now I have the feeling that I won’t know what it is until clips start to hit the cutting room floor. This could be a story of triumph or defeat, I won’t sugarcoat anything. If I have to make two different projects, one for Dan and one for myself because he wanted it to tell a different narrative, then I happily will. This is the first time I think that I can actually be creative with filming a documentary, as opposed to the “fly-on-the-wall” approach, which is how I plan to make something amazing.

This project mostly lies on my shoulders. Dan is very laid back when it comes to doing retakes and reshoots, which is a documentarians dream, and he will be a big help in getting an idea of how to film. I might or might not have a friend help me with the project (any Convergence students who are reading this and are interested, I’d love to hear from you!). This has the potential to be a great portfolio piece for me and I’m hoping it will show off my talent (assuming I have any). As far as taking advantage of convergence, I think mixing this piece with the internet in order to gain attention to the organization is a very big part. 

My intentions on how it will make change and why it is important are pretty much the same (and the same as Dan’s). It is important because it can show that there is a force out there that wants to make a change, which is to help out those who are less fortunate and without opportunity. A young kid could watch this and learn that there is a place for them. Or another person like Dan could be inspired to create their own organization to help the same type of people. Although there is an overall plan and goal for this project and what it could be, it’s a bit scary having something that is leaning towards a more run-and-gun form of execution. One of my many goals is to plan everything out as much as possible with Dan in the next coming weeks. Hopefully we will have something inspiring to show the children, mentors, ourselves, and, most importantly, the community.