Young adults are plants. Too little water, and they dry out. Too much water, and they drown. Raise them in the safety of a greenhouse, and they crumple under their weight. Transplant them outside immediately, and they will go into shock (I learned the hard way through the death of my beloved tomato plants).
Under the perfect conditions — with the right amounts of sunlight, water and nourishment — they will grow taller than you ever thought possible.
In Milwaukee, tucked within the unsuspecting 2nd floor of Nō Studios in Milwaukee’s brewery district, two individuals cultivate the next generation of Milwaukee creatives, giving them the support and resources they need to flourish.
Ian Cessna and Marquise Mays run the Take 1 and Take 2 Teen Filmmaking Lab offered by Milwaukee Film. Over a 16-week semester, the instructive and collaborative (and free) program unites young film lovers from across the city, teaching everything they need to know, from idea development to distribution.
The magnum opus is an end-of-semester showcase in which the student's projects grace the silver screen at the historical Oriental Theatre. Through conversations with past Take 1 students and Ian and Marquise themselves, it’s evident that Milwaukee’s creative roots run deep, and a new generation of young creatives is germinating.
A trial run toward a possible future
In 2019, Cessna, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee film graduate, was approached by the current education director to see if he’d be interested in teaching a new high school filmmaking lab. Ultimately, he applied not because of his future, but rather his past.
“The most important thing for me was that while growing up was that I never had access to arts education in high school,” Cessna recalled. “So I was excited about the opportunity to give students access to it before they have to go into higher education and spend thousands of dollars to possibly find out it's not the right path for them.”
In January of 2020, the class kicked off. Among the nervous group of new students, unaware that some of our lives changed as soon as we walked through the door, was me — a high school sophomore and a self-described arthouse enjoyer with a movie journal that meticulously rated and reviewed every movie watched in the last month.
Unfortunately, just two months into the quarter, Take 1 had to take five due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With meetings moved to Zoom, the first semester had a virtual setting but a very real enthusiasm that carried over to the following spring.
The new semester brought new faces like Sophie Hatton, who found the class through the classic Google search maneuver — “film classes near me” — because they quite simply weren’t an option in her current location. “My high school didn’t have any filmmaking classes,” Hatton said, “and I wanted to improve and have a place to actively learn.”
From our respective beds and living rooms, those three hours every Monday night became an opportunity for ideas and friendships to take root. Cessna cultivated an environment where we could share without judgment, critique with kindness and compassion, and dream without boundaries.
Missing the mark and trying again
That environment led to connections like mine with Quinn Jennings. Reminiscing about our first films — mine about two girls having a deadly tea party, and Jennings' film, A Medium Day in the Park, inspired by an interaction with an eccentric customer at her hair salon job at the time — we shared a cringe.
With crunchy sound quality and dialogue that attempted feature-length depth and humor in just 5 minutes, these weren’t so much films as wishful games of darts — a bullseye in mind, but missing the board entirely.
However, these films had to be made. Reflecting on it, Jennings noted, “I was very proud that I had something to put into the world.” We couldn’t believe how lucky we were to be in a space where our ideas felt important and we felt empowered to tell our stories without fear of rejection or embarrassment. The supportive environment, again, came from the life experiences Cessna and Mays brought to the program.
“Ian and I both had a specific idea of what the Industry was, and I think me and him both came into this class wanting to offer you guys a different version than what was introduced to us,” Mays said. “There is such a seriousness about filmmaking and the practice. … Me and Ian had a mutual understanding that filmmaking should be fun; it’s about playing and imagination.”
Take 1 was at its outset and still is miles from the usual academic environment in which you retake a class almost exclusively because of poor performance. Students come back because of enthusiasm and excitement. It’s a blank slate giving us another opportunity to find our voices and experiment through the visual medium of film.
For Cessna, those boomerang students coming back again and again were the biggest shock of the past four years. They were also the driving force behind Take 2, a more collaborative iteration of Take 1 that kicked off in 2023. It was an “unexpected, pleasant surprise of students wanting to come back,” Cessna said, with Mays adding, “It's grown in a way that me and Ian don't realize what it is yet.”
An award-winning addition
Another sign of that growth came at the start of the fall 2021 semester, when Mays joined the program as an award-winning local filmmaker who moved back to Milwaukee after finishing graduate school at the University of Southern California.
With a new documentary expert, a slew of new personal stories sprang forth — a family homecoming in Ireland, a deep dive into Stan behavior and even a mockumentary of the fiscal journey of a local vampire starting his pop-up blood bank. Seeing projects like those pour from the program made students like Hatton change their views of the city as a whole.
“It’s really made me appreciate Milwaukee,” said Hatton, who before Take 1 had a hazy view of the city’s filmmaking scene, thinking the reel rolled faster in other cities like Los Angeles or New York City. Guest lectures by local filmmakers and a field trip to the Milwaukee Show at the Milwaukee Film Festival heightened her appreciation and helped her reach a different conclusion: “The Midwest has such a weird space and such weird stories that don’t need to leave the Midwest to be told.”
More pointedly, the Take 1 community providing stability during these years of uncertainty has been a pivotal moment in Hatton’s teenage years. With a whopping six semesters of Take 1 under her belt, she’ll pursue film at UW-Milwaukee this fall.
The program has also etched a path for Jennings, who at first was concerned about entering the film industry, with its looming financial and career risks. However, the guidance and mentorship from Cessna and Mays emboldened her to apply for scholarships at the University of Southern California to pursue Cinema/Media Studies and Screenwriting.
Now entering her second year at USC, Jennings still reserves a special place in her heart for Milwaukee Film. If not for Take 1, she said, “I would not have the confidence in myself or my artistic autonomy.”
Getting their time in the spotlight
In just a few short years, Take 1 has screened around 90 student short films at the Oriental Theatre — all of which are now permanent additions to the Milwaukee Film archive — as part of its end-of-semester showcase.
The culmination of weeks of hard work includes a little more from Cessna, who handcrafts and hangs custom posters for each short film produced during the semester. The showcase is an exhibition of growth, with some students making their first-ever short film and others exploring different genres such as horror or music videos. A brief Q&A facilitated by Cessna and Mays follows each film, giving students a chance to share vulnerable insight to ideas that previously existed only in their minds and the Take 1 classroom, but now have become tangible and visible to others.
Having only formed four years ago, Take 1 has and will continue to inspire a new generation of Milwaukee creatives. Cessna and Mays welcome students but cultivate masterful storytellers and artists by nourishing them with unconditional kindness, support and understanding. They enable their students to grow tall, toward the light of success.
“Parents often come up to us after and praise the program,” Mays said. “I think me and Ian tell them, ‘No. Praise your child. They are the person you should believe them to be and are showing you that they are.’”
Part-time writer and environmental studies student Dara Carneol dabbles in everything from radio to filmmaking to crocheting with plastic bags to wondering how she killed the tomato plants in her garden. She is a full time enjoyer of puns, hypothetical questions and narrating the life of her dog, Chase.