When the Rotary Club of Longboat Key wanted to create some short films with a coastal ecology theme, it came up with what turned out to be a brilliant idea. Why not hand the project to students in the film program at Ringling College of Art and Design? Give the young people some hands-on experience and make the budget leaner in the process.

Club members Jeff and Terry Driver approached Patrick Alexander, the head of the Ringling film program, with the request. “It was an immediate ‘yes,’” Alexander says. “I live on the coast; that’s the reason my wife and I came here. We had been wanting to get involved in environmental efforts.”

After months of planning, pre-production, location shoots and editing, three films were completed in May. (As of January, they had not yet been released.) The short videos — two-and-a-half to three minutes long — feature Save Our Seabirds, the Longboat Key Turtle Watch and the successful effort in the early 1990s to save Sister Keys from development and instead make it a 74-acre nature conservancy.

Word of the Rotary Club project and the short films has since circulated in the nonprofit world, and other organizations came forward wanting films made. Patrick’s wife, Alison, formed a nonprofit production company, Florida Eco Films, which is separate from Ringling, to act as an umbrella organization. New projects are underway, with more in the pipeline. 

At the project’s inception, Alexander placed it under the aegis of the school’s Index program, which provides students with opportunities to gain real-world professional experience. He recruited the best students in the branded storytelling program to form production teams for each film. Senior Celi Mitidieri was tapped to direct all three. 

She’s a budding documentarian who has since moved to Los Angeles. “I saw it as an opportunity to have a relationship with clients and help realize their specific vision in a documentary storytelling way,” she says. “It was always about, ‘How can we make this compelling for the people watching?’ — so it’s not just another boring nonprofit film.”

Mitidieri’s lean teams included two producers, a cinematographer who also handled the camera and a sound mixer. They spent hours doing pre-interviews to help flesh out the story in advance and decide on locations and interviewees. Each project took one or two days to shoot. One editor cut all three films.

The students received academic credit for their work, and were also paid $15 an hour. “We were spending a lot of time outside of class working on the projects,” Mitidieri says. “Paying us allowed us to put forward our best energy.”

Finishing the three films did not mean the initiative was complete. “The students had to develop marketing plans on how to distribute the videos to help clients promote them, how to think about SEO (search engine optimization) and other factors,” Alexander says. “We got business students involved to develop ways to get eyeballs on these things.”

As of mid-December, that process was ongoing.

Here’s a thumbnail of each film:

Longboat Key Turtle Watch

Image courtesy of Ringling College

It’s effectively a love story about “science nerds” Jeff and Terry Driver, their shared love of the natural world and their shared commitment to sea turtles. Much of the film shows the couple on the beaches of Longboat Key, walking, jogging, embracing. Also included is footage of baby turtles crawling through the sand. “We didn’t have the opportunity to film the turtles because it wasn’t turtle season,” Mitidieri says. “Fortunately, [Turtle Watch] had filmed during turtle season the year before and were able to provide us with footage.”

Key Line: “Once you observe a hatchling, it’s all over. They’re like the cutest thing on the planet.” –Jeff Driver

Sister Keys 

Image courtesy of Ringling College

The film starts with a lovely sunset shot, then a voiceover from Rusty Chinnis, a prominent local environmentalist who lives on Longboat Key. He goes on to tell the story of the Sister Keys Conservancy, a small group that in 1992 worked with the town of Longboat Key, which purchased the islands and spent $1.5 million to transform them into a nature preserve.

“I’m not necessarily a big nature person, and we had to go to Sister Keys to shoot,” Mitidieri says with a chuckle. “It’s conserved, so there are bugs everywhere. You had to be careful where you stepped. Because I was scared of the bugs, I was really trying to keep it together. I didn’t want to yell when I saw a spider or when one touched me.”

Key Line: “If you take a piece of land and if you leave it alone, if you give it a chance, you’ll see the restorative power of nature. We get the Sister Keys. Never doubt that a small group can make a difference and change the world.” –Rusty Chinnis

Save Our Seabirds

Image courtesy of Ringling College

The film treats the viewer to live shots of the beautiful birds that reside at the Sarasota facility because they are incapable of surviving in the wild. Save Our Seabirds’ core mission is to rescue, rehabilitate and release hundreds of injured birds per year. On the day of the shoot the person earmarked for the main interview left to deal with a bird emergency, Mitidieri says, so the team got together and came up with an alternate plan. They shot an interview with Executive Director Brian Walton, but also interviews with working staff members. 

“We filmed inside the bird areas and there were some moments when we wanted to film an interview and all the birds started screaming,” Mitidieri says. “They could tell we were filming. When we cut, they got quiet. They were like, ‘I wanna be on camera too.’”

Key Line: “We’re able to put [the birds] here and use their stories to educate people about how we need to do a better job of helping birds coexist with us.” –Brian Walton