Burns Middle School to Host Second Annual Story Starter Film Competition

The Student and Filmmaker Alliance (SAFA) held its second annual Story Starter Film Competition in 2011, an innovative program that brought together middle school students and local filmmakers in Mobile, Alabama, through the power of creative writing and cinema. The program paired more than 700 seventh and eighth grade students at Burns Middle School with amateur and professional filmmakers from across the Mobile area, transforming a routine classroom writing exercise into short films destined for a public screen. At a time when arts programming in public schools frequently ranked below core academics in budget conversations, the competition offered a low-cost model for linking the classroom to the Gulf Coast’s growing community of working filmmakers.

How the Competition Worked

The competition began with a community-sourced writing prompt. Members of the public were invited to submit short “Story Starter” prompts — one or two lines designed to spark the imaginations of middle school writers — and the winning line became the required opening for every essay written during the school’s competition day. The previous year’s prompt, “It was the strangest thing I had ever seen, with tubes and wires…,” had inspired student narratives spanning genres from science fiction and dystopian drama to slapstick comedy, demonstrating that a single opening sentence could send seven hundred young writers in a dozen different creative directions at once.

During the school’s annual timed narrative writing assessment, students were given 90 minutes to craft creative essays incorporating the chosen prompt. Timed writing is a fixture of language arts instruction in Alabama public schools, where students routinely practice composing complete narratives under a clock in preparation for standardized testing, and the competition harnessed that existing exercise rather than adding a new burden to the instructional day. The Language Arts Department at Burns Middle School then selected 25 winning stories from the submissions, giving classroom teachers the final word on which pieces displayed the strongest storytelling, the sharpest detail, and the most promising raw material for adaptation.

This year’s winning prompt — “I finally found out what was the matter with that crazy lady down the street” — was submitted by Brennan Gibson. The line’s blend of neighborhood mystery and offbeat humor set the tone for the year’s batch of student stories, which leaned toward suspense, eccentric characters, and dark comedy rather than the science fiction leanings of the inaugural competition.

From Page to Screen

Local filmmakers had the opportunity to turn those winning stories into short films. At the Story Starter Film Competition Kickoff, held at Satori Coffee House on Old Shell Road in Mobile, participants learned the year’s theme, received competition details, and randomly selected one of the 25 winning student narratives to serve as the basis for their film. The random draw was a deliberate part of the format: it pushed filmmakers outside their creative comfort zones, prevented every team from chasing the same flashy premise, and guaranteed that even the quietest winning story found its way to a screen.

The finished films were then screened at a public event where students and judges voted on their favorites. Completed films were due by Tuesday, April 12, and organizers planned screenings at Burns Middle School as well as a public showing at the Mobile Public Library in late April, giving the young authors the rare experience of watching their words reinterpreted by other storytellers. Organizer Renae Brewer coordinated participation through the Student and Filmmaker Alliance, and the kickoff meeting was scheduled for 6:30 p.m. — an evening hour chosen so that working filmmakers, students, and weekend hobbyists alike could attend without missing school or work.

The choice of venues said much about the grassroots character of the Mobile film scene. Satori Coffee House had become a familiar gathering spot for the city’s creative class, sitting along the Old Shell Road corridor near the academic orbit of Spring Hill College, while the Mobile Public Library’s meeting spaces gave the final screenings a civic stage open to any resident who wanted to attend. The production groups that joined the competition ranged from organized outfits such as Jolt Productions to school film clubs and solo hobbyists working under names like Stupid Mop Productions, Death in Stilettos, Burning Mirror Films, and BRTL Films — a reminder that on the Gulf Coast, a short film can come together with a borrowed camera, a handful of friends, and a single weekend of shooting.

2011 Competition Results

The second annual Story Starter Film Screening celebrated nine finalist films and announced three winners. Ben Bentley took Best Story, Scotty White won Best Film by Student Choice, and Andrew Preston earned Best Film by Judges Choice. The dual voting format put the two audiences on equal footing: students in the theater voted for the film they most enjoyed watching, while a panel of judges evaluated the entries on craft, rewarding the filmmaking that best honored its source story and showed the most technical polish.

For the young writers, the awards carried a meaning that went beyond the trophies themselves. Every finalist film began as an essay drafted in a classroom during a school-day assessment, and every filmmaker who took the stage had chosen that essay at random from a stack written by students they had never met. The result was a rare kind of reciprocity: students discovered that strangers considered their writing worth months of production work, and filmmakers discovered a bottomless well of local material written with an unfiltered imagination that adult screenwriters often spend years trying to recover.

The Finalist Films

Nine filmmaker teams produced short films based on randomly selected winning student narratives, and the final slate read like a sampler of teenage imagination. “Werecorn,” a story written by Sara Armstrong, was filmed by Tony West of Jolt Productions. “Going Crazy,” written by Lillie Busch, was filmed by Trey Brannon. “The Faceless,” written by Mitch Carter, was filmed by Keli Mazza and James Burke for the SHC Film Club, while “Cupcake Cannibal” — written by Gracie Griffin and filmed by Timothy Dixon, Trey Lane, and Brennan Gibson for Burning Mirror Films — gave the competition its most memorably macabre title.

The remaining finalists rounded out a slate that swung from slapstick to suspense. “Door to Door,” based on “She isn’t what you think” by Sarah Lawrence, was filmed by Scotty White of Stupid Mop Productions — the entry that carried White to the student-choice prize. “Wal Mart Ninja Incident,” written by Ben Bentley and filmed by Logan Bowes of Jolt Productions, translated a big-box retail errand into action comedy. “Ms. Gonzalez,” written by Jasmine Ramsey and filmed by Margaret Broach of Death in Stilettos, and “The Case of Mrs. Drawsworth,” written by LaShayla Bedell and filmed by Tinashe Nyatanga of BRTL Films, brought mystery to the lineup, while “High Score,” based on “What happens in New York stays in New York” by Passiah White and filmed by Andrew Preston of BRTL Films, completed the nine-film program and earned Preston the judges’ top honor.

Bridging Education and the Arts

The Story Starter Film Competition represented a creative approach to arts education in Mobile, connecting classroom writing exercises with real-world filmmaking. By pairing professional and amateur filmmakers with student writers, SAFA created a pipeline that validated young writers’ work and exposed them to the collaborative process of bringing stories to life on screen. For the 25 winning students, watching a filmmaker draw their name from the pile at the Satori kickoff turned an abstract classroom assignment into a tangible creative product — something with a title, a crew, and eventually an audience of strangers laughing at a joke they had written in pencil during a timed assessment.

The competition also gave Mobile’s filmmaking community a recurring showcase and a shared project to rally around. The fact that the event had reached its second annual edition suggested a durability that one-off arts festivals rarely achieve: the same organizers, the same school partner, and a filmmaker roster that grew year over year. Burns Middle School, a part of the Mobile County Public School System, served as the hub of the program, while the public screening at the Mobile Public Library carried the results beyond the school’s walls and into the broader community.

In the end, the 2011 competition demonstrated how a modest idea — a one-line writing prompt, a 90-minute essay, a handful of volunteer crews — could ripple outward into nine finished films, three awards, and a semester of creative momentum for hundreds of students. For SAFA and its partners at Burns Middle School, the Story Starter format proved that the distance between a seventh-grader’s opening line and a finished short film was shorter than most people in the room had ever imagined, and that Mobile’s film community was ready to make the trip every year.