original project pitch for bypassed documentary
Meet the Project
We all know of a town like this: a place you've been warned to bypass instead of cut through, a place known more for its stigma than its stories.
BYPASSED is an interactive documentary about one such place, the city of Coatesville. The poorest municipality within the state's wealthiest county, Coatesville is a once-prosperous steel town that has struggled to reinvent itself in a postindustrial America.
This documentary serves to go beyond the biased local media and to share the real Coatesville with the outside world.
Instead of dwelling on the negatives, our project has been designed to celebrate residents' hope and determination to challenge the stereotypes forced upon them by mainstream media.
The local media has often been criticized for its biased and unflattering portrayal of the town. Last summer Al Jazeera America added their voice to fray when they referred to Coatesville as "2 square miles of ghetto".
This project will circumvent the mainstream media to present a more complete truth about Coatesville. The finished website will weave video portraits, photography, audio interviews and storytelling projects into an interactive user experience artfully designed just for BYPASSED.
We will blend professionally produced and community generated content into one web-based documentary, to build bridges between Coatesville and the greater community, and to facilitate healing and progress within the city itself.
Planned Impact
As Coatesville now stands on the brink of its own rebirth, we wonder what has been different about this city? What does the future look like for those who have called the city home? How long does place-based shame take to heal?
We hope that, through the broadening of the public's perception about Coatesville, we can contribute meaningfully to the city's rebirth. This may be a documentary, but we believe being SEEN and HEARD can have a life-changing impact on the people involved. We also hope to create a lasting perception shift for outsiders, that will inspire investor confidence in the city and fuel its economic revitalization.
This place and its people hold important stories that have been kept down thanks to issues of structural racism, poverty, and mismanagement in its former city council. But many have never lost hope. Together we will show the audience why we believe; we will make them believers.
What We Need From You
We are so confident in the compelling stories that our participants have shared and will share, that we are only looking to crowdfund the film and animation portion of our budget. With your contributions, we can make beautiful film vignettes that will help attract private investors and grants to our work, and fund the creation of our custom website.
Our goal is to raise $25,000-35,000 with this campaign.
For each person or organization we feature, the cost breakdown is $1500 for the film and editing crew.$1500 x ten film vignettes = $15,000.
For the stop-motion animated short that will open the film experience and introduce the audience to Coatesville, as well as animated features which will enhance the user experience on our website, the animation budget is $10,000.
Our stretch goal for filming is to raise an additional $10,000 so we can feature more citizens and organizations.
Work has already begun, funded out of my own pocket and with support from the 2015 Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation. While I have been able to fuel the start-up on sheer passion, we need your investment to see it through. We have an amazing team just waiting to dive in and create an artful and beautiful tribute to this unique city.
Production Team
Our team includes a stop-motion animation artist, who will create a short animation introduction to the film, and animated elements to enhance user experience for our website. Their animated short will greet users when they visit our site and provide even the most distant viewer a crash course in all things Coatesville. It will also set our project apart from other documentaries thanks to this creative and fresh approach to animation.
Our film team has worked collectively on multiple projects from big budget film to television to music videos and independent work. I will continue to donate my time as director, but we'll need your contributions to support our team.
Project Director and Editor: Sarah Alderman
Director of Photography for Trailer: Eliza Taylor
Gaffer for Trailer: Tom Fanelle
Production Assistants for Trailer: Shannon Bertoni, Dan Reiner
Spoken word poem written and performed by Aadil Malik
A partnership with storytelling platform Cowbird will enable us to have community generated content embedded within our website. This is important because not only the stories we find most compelling will reach our audience, but everyone in the community with a desire to be heard, can take part. Community storytelling workshops have already begun thanks to a partnership with AHHAH.
Because our storytelling process aims to engage the community through workshops and one-on-one work, and because we will craft an online experience for people across the country to interact with, our budget is larger than that of a traditional documentary.
We plan to work with the Coatesville Area School District and local youth organizations and churches, to give their members an opportunity to create and contribute video, photography, and creative writing pieces, which will be featured alongside our professional content. This content can be produced without our full team but still requires the time of our editing and design team.
Bottom line?
The more you invest, the more stories we can feature in this work. We hope you can see the power of your investment!
Meet the Director
My name is Sarah Alderman, and I'm the director and producer of BYPASSED. Like 3 generations of my family before me, I was raised in the heart of Coatesville, PA. This tiny apartment above storage garages was my home until I turned 13.
I fell in love with the city through my own childhood experiences, and through my grandmother's stories about Coatesville's golden era. I grew up appreciative of the vibrancy, authenticity and diversity of my hometown. Proud of the struggle, too. The older I got, the more I saw these qualities lacking in other parts of the county: both the socioeconomic and racial division that seemed to make Coatesville 'less than', and the strong communion of shared adversity we felt as residents.
As I got older, it became clear to me that being from Coatesville carried a stigma, and that stigma has seemingly worsened in the past two decades. At some point, I stopped telling people where I was from. I wasn't strong enough yet to own my hometown, when owning it was so often met with a knowing look and a dismissive attitude.
I never want another kid to feel that way about growing up in Coatesville.
The concept for this project has been evolving over the past seven years. More recently, it became a persistent calling and a solidified action plan was formed. Through my experience as lead photographer and owner of AGPcollective, serving as a field assistant for a national storytelling project, and time as the 2015 Dr Mian A Jan Fellow for the Chester County Historical Society, I began to see how my skills could serve the community.
The decision to use a transmedia platform/interactive documentary for Coatesville's stories was inspired by works like HOLLOW and Welcome to Pine Point. The storytelling aspect was inspired by working with Aaron Huey on his Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project for National Geographic. I believe the people of Coatesville deserve a beautiful and artful place to come together and be heard in the media, and a way to share their stories in their own authentic voices.
Risks & Challenges
So...what if you don't reach your fundraising goal?
The beauty of BYPASSED is that the project can evolve organically to fit within the budget available to us. Whether or not it can become the masterpiece we have designed is up to you and your support. Should we fall short of our campaign goal, we will scale back the number of film vignettes we start with, and hope that a larger body of work will help us to secure grants and private funding. Regardless of money, we will continue to run storytelling workshops, make photo essays, and record audio stories as a labor of love.
If we reach our fundraising goal with this campaign but fail to secure the funds for our custom website, we will complete the project by enhancing our existing website and using click-through options to feature the film vignettes through Vimeo.
Other Ways You Can Help
Share this campaign on all your social feeds. Tag your posts #lifttheville so we can find you and show our thanks.
There is a power in numbers. If you can't contribute financially, approach any organizations in the Coatesville area that you are affiliated with and tell them about our project.
If you are the director of a non-profit organization in the 19320 zip code and you think your agency's work should be featured, email thecoatesvilleproject@gmail.com to tell us more.
If you run a youth organization or teach in the CASD, invite project director Sarah to host a writing workshop for your students, so their voices can become part of the project.
BYPASSED is dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Dorothy 'Dot' Carter, who so generously shared her stories with us before her passing. And to my grandmother, Theresa Chille Puglisi, whose life inspired this work.