Up the stairs from a green door on the side of Hamil ton's is a set of rooms that would be any yuppiecouple's dream. The windows are huge, the shelves run from floor to ceiling, and the entire space is flooded with light.
But instead of being the ideal loft apartment, this space goes toward more creative purposes - as a place where self-motivated teenagers can learn the basics of video production.
Light House Studio, founded in 1999, occupies this airysecond floor space on the Downtown Mall. Shannon Worrell, creative director and co-founder of Light House, said the program's original vision aimed to provide teens with basic video and film technology while allowing them to tell their stories without the pressure of earning a grade.
"We get a lot of kids that are really highly motivated, creative kids," Worrell said. "Everyone has mentor attention and guidance, but we give them a lot more freedom than I think they would have in a school environment."
Every Wednesday and Saturday for the last two months, a group of teens has met in the studio as part of a workshop entitled "Video Diaries."
This particular Saturday, they laugh and tease each other as they pose for pictures. This is the last session before the teens begin to edit their final films, so the adult mentors coax them to "show me the movie."
The workshop consists of a series of assignments, such as creating a video portrait of an object, a person or a poem, eventually culminating in a final film project. Each assignment is accompanied by two video diary entries, each 30 seconds in length. The diary entries may be about anything from what the teens did during the day to a story they want to tell.
"None of us did them for 30 seconds," said workshop participant Reychel Beatrice, a sophomore at Renaissance High School. "They always went over, at least for me."
Beatrice got involved with Light House after taking a videography class at her high school.
"Since I was 5 I've been taking snapshot pictures," she said. "I just liked being behind the camera. But when that first videography assignment was over, I liked the outcome so much I thought, 'Wow, this is just awesome.'"
Although she said she has always wanted to be an actress and appeared in productions both at her middle school and at Live Arts, she now sees her future with a different focus.
"I find directing more satisfying," Beatrice said. "When you're the director, you're in charge of what happens. I like being the person who is in control."
Light House's benefits extend beyond foundations for the future to provide introspective opportunities for the present.
"The video diary entries were very therapeutic for me, actually," Beatrice said. "I made entries about things I've never really told anyone, my deep dark secrets."
Fellow workshop student Justin Wolf, a home-schooled sophomore, gains a different experience from the video diary entries.
"I've found that my video diaries have been revealing," Wolf said. "It's hard to be in front of a camera and try to be realistic. A lot of the time you maybe think you're being realistic and then you watch it back and it doesn't look like you. And you don't know if that's just your own personal insecurities, or what."
This spring marks Wolf's second session with Light House. He took the more intensive "Make Movies" workshop last summer.
"I heard about it through word of mouth, really," he said. "I had an interest in film so I thought I'd give it a shot."
Like many of the teens who work with Light House, he is extremely self-motivated, and has many other talents. In addition to songwriting and playing the guitar, he does stage managing and other behind the scenes work with Live Arts.
"I'm spreading myself really thin right now in terms of artistic interests," Wolf said. "It's a good thing and a bad thing. It gives me a lot of time to explore different things, but then again it never really gives me enough time to refine or sharpen certain things."
Participating at Light House requires no prior experience, and the program provides all of the camera and editing equipment. The workshops do, however, cost around $200.
"I think they give you plenty of knowledge to start off," Wolf said. "It's the kind of thing I think you have to really work to become more adept at, but they definitely give you the tools necessary to get there."
The program also pairs teens with a mentor who helps them to decide what movie they want to make and aids them through the process.
The mentors are adult Charlottesville residents with film experience, who volunteer their time for the program.
Worrell said she wishes she had been provided with such an opportunity when she was a teenager.
"Teenage voices need to be heard," she said. "Their stories need to be taken seriously, not as a by-product of some teenage malaise."
She said she sees teenagers as more open to artistic expression than adults because they have not yet learned to impose an intellectual structure on everything they do. At the same time, she recognizes that Light House provides benefits outside of the simple video-making experience to people in this transitional phase of their lives.
"There is a kind of group therapy component to the video diary workshops," Worrell said.
She added that conflicts often emerge through the video diary entries and that mentors encourage students to explore those conflicts in their final films.
Many of the students who Worrell and the other mentors work with have especially potent struggles to document.
"We have two filmmakers in the workshop who are in the juvenile justice system right now, and they're making films about their experiences with the juvenile justice system," Worrell said. "It's sort of forced rehabilitation and also self-rehabilitation. They're both really smart kids who have a vision for their films that I'm excited about."
She also enjoys the films that are more a-day-in-the-life-of-me style. One of the Light House project's secondary goals aims to create a video archive of Charlottesville stories, what Worrell calls a "digital-age oral history."
Light House uses various venues to display the products of the workshops, ranging from public displays to private viewings.
Last fall a video installation on the Downtown Mall displayed the workshop participants' responses to Sept. 11. Other venues include short film festivals and screenings at the end of workshops.
PBS's Virginia affiliate will air two Light House films at the end of May as part of a short film showcase.
"It's as close as there is to the big time," Worrell said. "We're trying to figure out other venues."
She said she feels that Lighthouse is achieving its goals, so far.
"We're inundated with the language of moving pictures, but not many of us learn to speak it and communicate," she said. "We're helping to create a generation of media-smarter teenagers"
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