It’s Saturday morning in a West Loop pizza parlor, and the restaurant is filled with youngsters. There are cameramen, mic operators and actors. The room buzzes with shouted instructions and shuffling toes because the forged and crew shoot a brief movie referred to as “The Final Slice.”
The director claps his fingers.
“Motion!” he yells, and the set falls silent.
The principle character enters the scene: an indignant pizza store proprietor who catches one among his teenage workers chatting up two feminine clients.
“Get out of my face” he shouts, “and take out the trash!”
The actor rises from his chair and drags his toes again into the kitchen.
“Lower!” the director yells once more, and the entire set breathes out in reduction.
“The Final Slice” follows a number of teenagers working in a pizza store as they plot their revenge in opposition to their Gordon Ramsay-esque boss.The storyline was developed by the kids who’re starring in and filming the film. They’re all a part of Luv City, a West Facet nonprofit that enrolls teenagers in movie programming to maintain them out of hassle in a few of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods.
The concept for this system got here to Dre Rodriguez after he spent a decade in federal jail for drug-dealing. His son, Little Dre, was a toddler when he went away. However as soon as he returned, he noticed that his now-11-year-old was gravitating towards the road life he fought laborious to depart behind.
“It actually scared me,” he says.
Rodriguez, 47, labored for a violence prevention program after his launch, mentoring gang-involved youth of his son’s era in Pilsen. Since all of them had been glued to their cellphones, Rodriguez searched for tactics he might join with them by way of their tech.
“I all the time requested myself, ‘How can we get in the cellphone?’ Like, the mentors ain’t on the cellphone,” he says. “So, I needed to provide you with a plan to invade their area however with out them feeling like they’re being invaded.”
Rodriguez determined to recruit his son and nephew to shoot a music video for an area rapper.
They filmed it on a cellphone, educating themselves how you can edit as they went.
They continued taking pictures music movies, and shortly, Rodriguez had teenagers from totally different neighborhoods reaching out with requests to affix his crew. “It simply changed into a ardour for me, as a result of I noticed numerous myself in them after I was their age, and simply form of figuring out what that path ultimately results in, attempting to assist them change into higher folks,” he says.
In 2022, Luv Metropolis acquired a state grant that allowed Rodriguez to maneuver this system into a ten,000-square-foot warehouse in West Garfield Park, the place teenagers take performing, videography and modifying courses yr spherical and get a stipend for collaborating.
The grant additionally enabled Rodriguez to improve his cellphone and laptop computer for skilled cinema gear — the gear that’s sprawled on the tables of Primos Pizza on the day of the shoot.
Throughout filming, Rodriguez’s son, Little Dre, stands behind a big monitor displaying what the cameras are recording. He’s not so little anymore: He’s now 18 and a freshman on the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He’s additionally directing “The Final Slice.”
Little Dre tells the cameramen when to start out and cease rolling, and whether or not he’s happy with a scene. Many of the teenagers on set are new to filmmaking, in order that they’re additionally determining numerous issues on the fly, like when an actor ought to enter the scene or how to verify a digicam is in focus.
As soon as, an actor burst out laughing mid-scene, and the manufacturing crew groaned as they realized they wanted to take it from the highest once more. However everybody loved the method of seeing one thing they created come to life.
Deanna Galvan, 18, who performs one of many cashiers, says she likes that she will get so as to add a few of her personal sassiness to her character. She needs to change into an actress, like those she grew up watching on The Disney Channel, and says Rodriguez’s program helps her find out how. It additionally “takes me off the streets,” she says.
Galvan sees Rodriguez as a task mannequin.
“From what he was once doing till now, he modified his complete life,” she says, “and he’s altering our lives doing this program.”
