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PLEASANTVILLE, N.Y. Aspiring young filmmakers will still have the opportunity to learn the tricks of the trade as the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville acquired a grant that will help continue one of its major educational programs, Minds in Motion.
This program integrates many valuable educational skills into a fun project and gives students a big boost in confidence as well, said Westchester County legislature Chair Ken Jenkins of Yonkers.
The grant of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts will continue the Minds in Motion program in the 2012-13 school year for the 10th year at Jacob Burns. The Burns Center will team up with five Yonkers public schools to allow underprivileged fourth-grade students the opportunity to learn film skills at no cost to the students. The Minds in Motion program is available only to school systems with more than 50 percent of their student population on free or reduced-price lunch.
The students participate in a 12-week program in which they create storyboards, shoot film and produce a short movie that is showcased at a red-carpet event at the Jacob Burns Center. Last year, students created stop-motion films by patching together more than 1,000 still shots into two-minute clips.
Grants like this are vital for sustaining programs like Minds in Motion so that children can continue to build their artistic talents, said county Legislator Virginia Perez of Yonkers.
The schools that will participate in the program in Pleasantville this year are PEARLS Hawthorne Elementary School, Paideia School 24, Casimir Pulaski Elementary School, School 30 and Kahlil Gibran School, all in Yonkers.
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