SLANT 45 HITS THE BIG SCREEN

Award-winning filmmaker Mark Birnbaum offers experience and creativity for service-learning program

Mark Birnbaum has been working on his SLANT 45 documentary for almost three months now, and the plot is beginning to thicken.

“I’d say it’s going very well,” Birnbaum said. “The challenge here was to sift through all of the ideas and projects that were coming through Big Thought and to sniff out what the best projects might be for us to follow through the film.”

Following a nationwide search, the North Texas Super Bowl XLV Host Committee and Big Thought tabbed Birnbaum as Producer and Director of a feature-length documentary meant to capture the creativity, imagination and good hearts of North Texas children and their communities.

Birnbaum filmed mid-February’s SLANT 45 launch at Pope Elementary School in Arlington and has since moved around a four-county region (Collin, Dallas, Denton, Tarrant), shooting various SLANT projects and returning to some. He is still in the early stages of formulating and polishing his own thoughts.

The documentary will encompass the entire SLANT endeavor. But it will also focus on specific projects, following them to fruition.

“We want to embrace diversity and get as wide a scope of projects to look at as possible,” Birnbaum said. “You’ve got to weed through them.”

Birnbaum combs over the possibilities at weekly meetings with Co-Producer Shelly Seymour and Funmi Okunbolde, who is overseeing the documentary for Big Thought.

“Some of them are going to be just great stories that will emerge as key stories in the film,” Birnbaum said. “I’m sure there’s going to be a flurry here toward the end of the school year. Then there’ll be projects that happen over the summer. And then, those projects that people have been thinking about now and have been gestating through the summer are going to take off in the fall.

“So there’ll be more projects for us to follow in the fall, and that’s going to head very quickly toward an editing deadline. It’s going to get a little bit crazier in September.”

Birnbaum expects shooting to end by mid-October.

“We’re feeling our way through each individual project,” Birnbaum said, “but the vision that I shared with Big Thought and the Host Committee as we went through the bidding project for the job is really bearing out.”

As an example of how moving the documentary could be, Birnbaum cited a project he only started shooting at the end of April. The students at Clarke Elementary School in Fort Worth have decided to do something about the significant gang presence, particularly in the form of graffiti, in their neighborhood.

“The City of Fort Worth goes out with its Graffiti Abatement Squad and paints out the graffiti in the morning,” Birnbaum said. “Then the gang just goes out and paints it up again at night. But this group of elementary school kids, through SLANT 45, has formed a committee to take on the graffiti themselves.

“They are talking with representatives of the police department. They’re marching around the neighborhood to point out different occurrences of graffiti. They’re formulating a plan to assist the police department and the City of Fort Worth in eliminating the graffiti. They’re talking about creating murals instead of graffiti, turning graffiti into art.

“I mean, this is so zeroed in on the idea that Big Thought and the Host Committee had for SLANT 45. This one has really struck home, and there’s an opportunity there to reach out into the lives of these children, into their homes, into their own lives, and talk to them about the sort of challenges that they face on a daily basis in these neighborhoods and the kind of impact that they can have on their community by engaging in this work.”

Birnbaum’s documentaries have won several prestigious awards, including the George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award and gold medals from film festivals in Berkeley, Charleston, Chicago and Houston. His "Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril" addresses the staggering drop in circulation of daily newspapers across the U.S. Another Birnbaum documentary (The Big Buy) tackled the tumultuous career of Texas Congressman Tom DeLay.