ACT NOW, founded in 2000, has been teaching young girls in western Massachusetts about movie making longer than its current participants have been alive.
The five-day program gives the girls — aged 10 to 14 — the opportunity to scout locations, outline stories, improvise dialog on camera and gain familiarity with the foundations of movie making, but artistic director Cindy Parrish said it also lets girls explore themes important to them, from bullying and friendship to environmental issues, politics and body image.
“In the confines of like-minded peers and women instructors, they’re able to explore that and have fun,” Parrish said.
The program is held in Northampton, Amherst and Great Barrington and some of the videos are posted online.
Parrish, who also founded Heroic Girlz, an arts and history program for adolescent girls, said girls can also learn from the basic rules of improv theater – that participants “take” something that’s given to them, and that they add something to that and make their partners look better.
“You work toward the community,” she said. “Those two rules are really rules for living.”
The emphasis on improvisation means girls don’t script their films, Parrish said. Instead, they spend the first half of the program in activities like Location Activation, wherein they use location scouting to build story ideas, and in fleshing out story outlines.
In the latter part of the week, Parrish said, girls act in their films and do some of the camera work, though coaches handle most of the shooting. Parrish usually puts together the final cuts, but she often shows editing basics to a handful of interested girls.
Parrish didn’t join the ACT NOW team until three years ago, but she estimated 700 to 800 girls have participated since its founding. Some of those girls, like 16-year-old Molly Weinberg, have continued to work with the program even after aging out of the participation group.
Weinberg participated in the program two years ago and returned last year as an assistant coach. She said her week as a participant taught her about both storytelling and collaboration, which she tried to pass on as a coach.
“I used the collaboration skills I had learned from the prior year to teach the new girls how to use them,” she said. “It was exciting and cool that I got to inspire them in a different way.”
Weinberg won’t be able to return this summer as a coach – she’ll spend part of it in New York City while she finishes work on an independent film, tentatively titled “Waking the Wild Colonial,” in which she’s starring and working in the editing process.
Her experience with ACT NOW prepared her to work on a professional film set, she said, and as she looks toward college — she’s considering majoring in film or musical theater — she sees the program as an important step.
“I think ACT NOW is a really important camp and workshop for young people … not only for people who want to go into acting and film but for people who want to explore themselves,” she said.
ACT NOW has expanded since Nancy Fletcher founded the program based on an improvisational filmmaking process developed by her partner, David Shepherd.
In 2013, it merged with the Cutchins Programs for Children and Families and has since offered programs for children with emotional and mental health disabilities. Parrish is also working on sharing the program’s methods with area schools.
For the girls in the summer workshops, ACT NOW can be an emotionally formative experience, Parrish said. They make movies without stars or leads, which puts the girls on a level playing field, she said.
“We’re doing what I sort of call socialist filmmaking,” she said. “It’s not move about one girl doing a whole bunch of things. The movie is about everybody.”