STREETSEEN  |  Rich Newman

Rich Newman: Connecting Local Filmmakers and Audiences

Story by Leah Fitzpatrick

Having written and directed nearly 20 short films and worked on four major studio feature films (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Alamo, Friday Night Lights and Man of the House), Rich Newman was no stranger to moviemaking when he relocated to Memphis from Austin, Texas a few years ago, but he needed a way to break into the film scene here. Back in Austin, he had networking opportunities in his industry thanks to stints as a script reader for the Austin Film Festival, a volunteer for the South By Southwest Film Festival and as an Austin Film Society member. He kept looking for the equivalent of those experiences in Memphis until deciding to take action instead of yelling it on set by creating the Memphis Film Society, a social network for filmmakers. 

 The society began in the spring of 2008 as a Yahoo! group that met quarterly (and soon thereafter more regularly) for mixers that incorporated guest speakers like Linn Sitler of the Memphis & Shelby County Film Commission and Erik Jambor of Indie Memphis. Actors, directors, crew members and plain-old film enthusiasts had shown enough interest by last year to prompt Newman to set up a formal mailing list with 2,000 people, as well as a Facebook page. Subsequently, the number of mixers, which usually take place at Celtic Crossing or Raffe’s Deli, held in 2011 increased to 10, with 12 scheduled for this year.     

“The reality is that filmmakers don’t want to walk around with a hat in their hands, but they can talk openly to people at mixers,” he relays. “It’s times like these where people can foster projects.”    

Perhaps some of the projects that get off the ground at mixers can be seen at the Memphis Film Society’s newest offering, Movie Nite, which debuted last November at Sky Grille. At these monthly gatherings, announced online at memphisfilm.org two weeks beforehand, moviegoers watch locally produced feature films in an environment that allows for socialization and Q&A panels with the respective filmmakers. For the first one, producer/director Jim Weter of At Stake: Vampire Solutions used the occasion as a test screening to gain feedback before tweaking the final cut. Newman encourages other filmmakers to do the same so they don’t jeopardize a movie’s premiere status.     

Newman adds, “Movie Nite has been great because people in the films come and see them for the first time, and it gives the local guy who no one pays attention to a chance to screen his movie.”     

The Memphis Film Society is also a resource for filmmakers, putting them in touch with mentors and offering workshops, beginning with a low-budget DSLR filmmaking workshop conducted along with Fuel Film on February 11-12 (more info on MFS webpage). There are also talks to hold a small horror/fantasy/sci-fi film fest in town.     

“Memphis is teeming with great young and old actors and great DIY filmmakers, so I hope we can be a support for that,” he muses.

STREETSEEN  |  Brandice Henderson

Photo by Steve Roberts

Brandice Henderson: Fashion Forward

Story by Leah Fitzpatrick

Brandice Henderson gained the New York fashion world’s respect for minority designers through her nonprofit Harlem’s Fashion Row, but in her native Memphis, she had yet to push the boundaries for underrepresented designers of color until this January. Currently in HFR’s fifth year, Henderson decided the time was right to infuse new energy into the nonprofit she now calls a movement by branching out to other cities, beginning with the HFR Fashion Art Exhibition held at 409 South Main in Memphis. Well received by a crowd of several hundred people, the event opened locals’ eyes to a new type of catwalk, namely one filled with diverse talent.      

Henderson shares, “My favorite moment of the night was seeing everyone enjoy themselves. In fact, I’m now glad that I changed the event three times because it wasn’t inspiring at first. We actually started from scratch just a few days before and stayed up till 3 a.m. to get it right.”     

The hard work paid off, resulting in an over-the-top display of avant-garde looks that melded art with fashion. Some elements of the Memphis exhibition were even interactive. For example, Henderson enlisted the help of Sachë on South Main to come up with the idea of having three models stand atop towering podiums in muslin fabric that draped to the floor so that guests could paint the dresses as if they were canvases. Meanwhile, ushers sported bowties by Moziah Bridges, a 10-year-old African-American designer and proprietor of Mo’s Bows, and Kris Keys, a young African-American fashion illustrator, strolled about the room with her sketchpad in hand to capture interesting moments. Upstairs, models walked the runway in ensembles from Sammy B., Bethune Bros, ImaniLia and LaQuan Smith.     

“I’m considering doing what I did here for my annual fashion editors meeting in New York where I discuss the annual HFR Show done during September Fashion Week, but I might take the event to places like Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago and D.C.,” says Henderson.     

She might be well on her way to changing the face of an industry that she says has experienced a decrease in minority designers’ marketplace presence during the last decade. After all, she started HFR as a one-time gig in Harlem, but it has since grown in scope and impact, with last year’s show highlighting collections by four designers of color at Jazz at Lincoln Center and a pre-event that honored June Ambrose, Tyson Beckford and Donna Williams. In 2011, Henderson also kicked off the HFR Conversation Series, where she interviews noted fashion industry professionals in a public setting to connect different generations in fashion, and the Designer Incubator Project, which helps up-and-coming designers with networking, branding, marketing and pricing strategies. Henderson’s ultimate goal is to support minority designers financially through design school scholarships or by giving them funding to start their lines.     

“This fifth year is big for us!” Henderson says. “Whatever happens this year will solidify HFR as a major player in the fashion industry.”

STREETSEEN  |  Alex Eilers

Photo by Steve Roberts

Alex Eilers: Antarctic Adventurer

Story by Leah Fitzpatrick

Admittedly hooked on the museum world, Alex Eilers cherishes being an informal educator as the Pink Palace Museum’s manager of education, but that  hasn’t stopped her from preparing to soon step foot in new territory, that of Antarctica. In fact, Eilers began training for her expedition to study Weddell seals in Antarctica more than a year ago, when PolarTREC (a professional program that gives teachers an opportunity to do hands-on field research in polar regions), selected her for the mission amongst 250 candidates. She embarks on her journey January 6, with an expected arrival date on the southernmost continent four or five days later.    

Eilers lights up, “A science continent is all Antarctica is, and lots of research is going on there which is fascinating.”

For this experience, Eilers shed her comfortable role of educator and became a student, as she knew nothing about Weddell seals when she was selected. To find out more about the species and her purpose in this mission, she headed to PolarTREC headquarters in Fairbanks, Alaska last February and received training on things like satellite phone use, what extreme weather gear to bring and how to maintain a trip blog on the PolarTrec site, which anyone can follow by going to polartrec.com and clicking on upcoming expeditions before she leaves and on current expeditions once in Antarctica. The goal of the project is to get rubber ID tags in between seals’ flippers and glue 20 satellite tags to their heads to keep track of yearly data, in addition to taking claw, whisker and fur samples to know the seals’ diet. The satellite tags will only remain on the seals through October, when another team comes to remove them, and will measure the salinity and temperature of the water and how far the seals live below the ocean surface since they have been known to dive more than 2,000 feet.

“Seals haul out on the ice, so we will go to those spots to try and get the tags on, and because they don’t have any land-based predators, they have no reason to be nervous,” she says.

Along with three principal investigators (Dr. Jennifer Burns of the University of Alaska Anchorage, Dr. Daniel Costa of the University of California Santa Cruz and Dr. Eileen Hofmann of Old Dominion Univer-sity), a videographer and two or three graduate students will accompany Eilers. She will stay in a dorm at McMurdo Station, which is about 850 miles away from the South Pole, and maintain daily journals until she leaves on February 20. While there, Eilers also promises to mail all the pre-stamped postcards turned in to the Pink Palace drop box before January 5 from the U.S. post office in Antarctica for those wanting a memento with the McMurdo Station postmark, and of course, she’ll share her research in an upcoming Pink Palace exhibit.

“I hope to raise awareness of what is going on down there with the sciences, and if I could inspire a student to go into a related field, that would be epic!” she beams.