Long Story Shorts

Maestro Filmworks presents “Long Story Shorts,” a team creative endeavor with an aspiration to build awareness, experience, education, and exploratory traditions into our process.

LSS BTS 2Photograph by  Max Grudzinski

The parameters bracket a short film featuring up to two characters, one location, and one minute of thought provoking, digestible story-telling, all completed in one day and strictly for distribution on Instagram.

“There is an underserved audience on Instagram with an appetite for short form content that no one is really tapping into,” says Kris Mendoza, Executive Producer at Maestro. “Our aim is to produce fun, digestible short films and passively bring them to your feed for your viewing pleasure.”

KAT 1640Photograph by  Kate Feher

For Maestro, these exercises keep the creative juices flowing.  We invite you to witness our progress, as we showcase our projects monthly!  Shown above is a Behind the Scenes vignette into the world created by Max Grudzinski, a talented photographer working with Maestro across multiple platforms.  Here, he is flexing his Directing muscles for the first time, kicking off our series with gusto!

 

 

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Classroom Champions

As an early collaboration for The Conductor Project, we partnered with  Classroom Champions, which helps keep at-risk youth on track by bringing Olympians, Paralympians and Olympic/Paralympic game hopefuls on board as Athlete Mentors who adopt 1-4 classrooms per year across the US and Canada.

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Focusing on their own personal journey, athletes share stories of their experiences with rigorous training, goal setting, competition, and perseverance. Using video lessons and live video chats, students are engaged with their athlete mentors several times per month, like a 21st century pen-pal.  The program also supports teachers by helping them incorporate these activities into their curriculum, focusing on letter writing, reading, geography, math, technology, goal setting and leadership.

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In order to showcase the work of Classroom Champions, Maestro produced a short video that was used for both promotional and fundraising purposes.  This captured the essence of the program, focusing on the sense of inspiration and accomplishment borne in each student and fostered by their Athlete Mentors.

6 Smiles. Can. Help.

Smile. Can. Help.

As our second collaboration with Stay True Philadelphia through our then subsidiary Philly Photo Studio,  we organized a canned food drive in the Fishtown/Port Richmond community by hosting a “Photo with Santa” day, wherein bringing canned goods would be the only ask for families looking to get photos with Santa. Students from Stay True came and helped gather cans and participated in arts and crafts with the children that came through. At the end of the day, more than 500 cans were collected to benefit Blessed Sarnelli, a soup kitchen in the neighborhood.