Scribe Video Center serves West Philadelphia
On the 3900 block of Lancaster Avenue, just under four miles from St. Joe’s campus, sits a storefront bearing the name Scribe Video Center.
The 37-year-old non-profit organization that seeks to give people the tools for social change through media arts moved to this location in April of 2018 under the direction of Executive Director and Founder Louis Massiah.
According to Massiah, a Philly native, Scribe gives people the ability to tell their stories through media.
“If you’re trying to reach a broad public, it’s important to know the language of documentary filmmaking, of non-fiction narratives,” Massiah said. “In some ways, the ability to communicate is a form of power. If you can talk to people, it allows for discourse, and that ability to be involved in discourse is a form of power.”
The recipient of the Arts Leadership & Service Award at the 2018 Pennsylvania Governor’s Awards for the Arts, Scribe serves people of all ages, and people come from all over to utilize their services, according to Massiah. The organization is largely documentary focused, having produced over 100 films of various lengths throughout their tenure.
They offer a series of workshops on documentaries as well as script writing, camera lighting, production, the Adobe suite, audio recording, color correction and more. According to Massiah, the participants in these workshops range in skill and age, from adults with an M.F.A. to college students to children.
Scribe’s services have changed since they opened their doors, but they remain based on what the community wants and needs.
“When we began in 1982, cameras were not ubiquitous,” Massiah said. “Getting access to a video camera was really difficult, so it became a place where people could share equipment. As the technology became a lot more accessible, it really is the skill of how you put things together.”
There are also screenings held both at Scribe and other locations, such as theaters throughout the city and even in the streets during the summer. Filmmakers from Philadelphia and elsewhere are also brought in to teach master classes like the one held on Feb. 13 by Stephen Maing, creator of a Sundance award-winning documentary called “Crime + Punishment.”
Kristal Sotomayor is the communications and outreach coordinator for Scribe, as well as a member of their film scholar program, in which members learn to make a documentary from start to finish. As a recent graduate from Bryn Mawr College, she recognizes the importance of what Scribe offers.
“Having access to filmmakers that have made it is really important and brings something to Philadelphia that we don’t have,” Sotomayor said. “Filmmakers here are often struggling to find the resources, and this is a wonderful resource for people.”
Maing spoke for two hours about his works and his creative process as an independent filmmaker to a diverse crowd of college students and adults who were expected to have some documentary experience.
Glenn Sonnie Wooden, a student in the University of Pennsylvania’s M.F.A. program, said Penn paid for the students in his class to attend Maing’s lecture. It was his first time at Scribe, but he compared the space to a church in the sense that it is a gathering of like-minded individuals.
“As I walk in, there are a lot of young black faces,” Wooden said. “Coming from the west side of Chicago where they’re constantly cutting after school programs, seeing kids here around four or five o’ clock means they have a place of support within the community.”
As a filmmaker who tells stories that he feels are going untold, Maing said he sees the importance in allowing people in West Philadelphia to communicate their stories with the help of places like Scribe.
“It’s important that citizens from across the entire political spectrum understand the importance and power of creating narratives, so we can diversify the messages that get put out by the media so there is more representation in the world,” Maing said.
