LISBON, Ohio – A first-of-its-kind school that uses remote and in-person instruction will teach film acting and production to area youths.
InFrame Academy will offer its initial class, It’s a Mystery, from March 8 to April 19.
While youth classes for live theater are common in the Mahoning Valley, InFrame sets itself apart by focusing solely on acting for the camera.
Students will start with six weekly video classes on Saturdays, using a teleconferencing app. The class and their instructor will then gather April 17-19 at Trinity Playhouse, 234 E. Lincoln Way in Lisbon, to create and shoot a film. Students in grades three through 12 are eligible.
Alison Cleland-Flannigan is the creative director, instructor and driving force behind InFrame. She is joined by executive director Tonya Tyler and technical director Spencer Cleland, who is Cleland-Flannigan’s brother.
The classes will cover every aspect of the unique world of film acting.
A Salem native who now lives in New York, Cleland-Flannigan grew up in the theater. Her mother, Kandace Cleland, is the executive director of Stage Left Players and a former middle school drama teacher. Stage Left presents its plays at Trinity Playhouse.
But Cleland-Flannigan has always preferred film over the stage and has a good deal of experience in it. After realizing she has a knack for teaching, she decided to put both of those skills together to launch InFrame Academy.
How It Started
Fate had a lot to do with her move into teaching.
Shortly after earning a degree in musical theater at East Carolina University, she injured her back while constructing a set for a local production.
The injury required surgery and put a damper on her stage career before it could even start.
“Being a performer, it took me out of the running for [any role with] dancing,” she says. “So I quickly learned that, with my mother being a teacher, I also had a knack for it. In fact, I loved it more than the performance end of things.”
After getting married, Cleland-Flannigan and her husband, Will Flannigan, moved to Arizona, where she taught film acting audition techniques.
“With my acting background, it was right up my alley,” she says of that job. “But it is so much different from stage acting.”
When the owner of her company realized Cleland-Flannigan was also a good writer, he got her to write scenes for the kids to perform to, which were then filmed as demo reels for audition purposes.
While she was teaching film acting, Cleland-Flannigan was also learning the film industry from the professionals that were brought in to shoot the audition reels.
She would travel with them to filming sessions in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and other countries, learning the technical aspects of filmmaking on the job.
Cleland-Flannigan got her first taste of filmmaking when she was a child, after her mother brought home a video camera.
“Me and my brother, Spencer, went crazy making videos,” she recalls. “I liked it more than stage acting, all the tricks and stuff you can do to create illusions. That movie magic always appealed to me, and the problem-solving it involves always appealed to me.”
Filmmaking teaches youngsters to think outside the box, she says, and her classes will include film production techniques.
“It’s not just acting,” she says. “We will take you from beginning to end, [starting with] writing and script development.”
Returning Student
As part of the preparation for launching InFrame Academy, Cleland-Flannigan presented a film acting class at Trinity Playhouse and other locations in August. It was a way for her to test ideas in building the curriculum.
About a dozen young students took part in the class, including Alaura Tyler of Lisbon. The fourth grade student at Lisbon McKinley Elementary School enjoyed the experience and will enroll in the course offered this spring by InFrame.
Her mother, Brittany Tyler, says Alaura has a busy schedule with school and sports, and the online instruction makes InFrame manageable.
Although Alaura has appeared in Stage Left productions for a couple of years now, acting is more of a hobby for her at this point, her mother says.
Taking acting courses “will certainly help her build confidence in whatever career path she follows,” Tyler says.
Parents were able to watch the filming last summer and see the ways the crew dealt with lighting and other issues as they arose. “They made parents feel very welcomed,” Tyler says.
Alaura’s schoolwork and public speaking ability have improved since she began acting, as have her communication on the field during sports, her mother says.
Kandace Cleland, Ali and Spencer’s mother and the director of Stage Left Players, says she is proud of the professionalism her children have built into InFrame Academy.
“I hope we can get local kids and families on board,” she says. “It’s a great opportunity. I was totally impressed when I saw them work during the August film shoot. I’m strictly a stage actor and had no experience with camera work before then. It’s definitely a different world.”
About the Course
Each of the students in InFrame’s upcoming course will be included in the writing process. Each will help develop the character that they will play in the film.
“They will be empowered to start making choices right away,” Cleland-Flannigan says. “That’s where building confidence starts. They’ll say, ‘Oh, I have this idea,’ and I’ll say, ‘Let’s go with it.’ In that little bit of encouragement, you see confidence growing in them.”
The online classes are effective, she says, because the lessons are centered on the thought processes of acting. The students, for example, must understand their character’s motivation and how that can be shown in their facial expressions.
“Most learning does happen on set, but I’ve always felt that a stronger performance can be created if the kids know a little bit beforehand,” Cleland-Flannigan says.
The in-person portion of the class will begin on a Thursday and run for three days. A camera crew will be brought in for it.
One important way that film acting differs from the stage is that actors do not acknowledge the camera or the audience, but only their fellow actors, she says.
“First the students will learn on-camera techniques [during the in-person portion], and then we will film for the next two days,” Cleland-Flannigan says. “We will also teach the science of the technology, because you have to know it, and also safety on the set.”
The class will use a green screen to create a special effect for the film.
The cost of the class is $250, with a discount available for students who are involved with Stage Left productions.
In the upcoming course, It’s a Mystery, the students will create and film a short mystery show. A followup course, It’s an Adventure, will be offered later this year, with students creating and shooting an adventure story while developing creativity and collaboration.
For information on registering, or to get involved in other ways, go to InFrameAcademy.org. The deadline to register is March 1.
Pictured at top: Director Alison Cleland-Flannigan holds a clapboard before a scene with actors Lorelei Cleland (near) and Reagan Smith. The cast was shooting a scene from their short film “Out of this World” last summer at David Anderson High School in Lisbon. (Photo by William Flannigan)