We’re thrilled to announce that we’re bringing Jonas Friedman on board as the composer for Class Dismissed. Music plays a really important role for any film, both in helping to create a tone and to carry the audience on an emotional journey, and as a very skilled musician and composer, we feel confident that Jonas will bring the film to a whole new level.

Here’s a little more about Jonas:

Jonas Friedman is an innovative composer and music producer of sound tracks for feature films, television, video games and national events. His emotionally driven scores immerse the audience in a unique world of sound styled by orchestras, acoustic instruments, audio manipulations and ambient sound design. He has worked on projects for Academy and Emmy Award winning directors and producers and scored for various production companies all over the world including the United States, Canada and United Kingdom . Jonas has also collaborated in some of the most elite recording and production facilities in the world with other Grammy and multiple Emmy Award winning composers all while making a name for himself as a professional, quality driven artist.

In December of 2011 Jonas was asked by award winning director Nick Forte to score to his film “Eleven – From WWII To Present Day”, that premiered at the GI Film Festival and was later broadcast on TPC. The success of the film and Jonas’s score opened several more opportunities for Jonas including scoring Forte’s upcoming feature length documentary “They Shall Live” (which features two time Academy Award winner Kevin Costner) and the award winning feature film Brilliant Mistakes.

In the summer of 2012 Jonas was brought on by Grammy and four time Emmy winning composer Brian Keane to do the musical sound design for the score on Barry Levinson and Tom Fontanna’s television series Copper. The BBC America series aired in June of 2012 and was the highest rated premiere in the networks history.

To listen to some of his work check out his website here.

As the editing continues, we’re really looking forward to collaborating with Jonas and can’t wait to witness how his music will help bring the film to life.

Jeremy, Dustin and the Class Dismissed Team

It’s been a little while since we blogged and we have a few things to update you with. Over the past couple of months, we’ve mostly been focusing on editing and sorting through the vast amount of footage that we’ve accumulated over the past 2 years. We’re happy to say that the process is going well and we have some sections of the film edited together that are starting to work very well. There’s still much to do in that area, and the editing process by it’s very nature is somewhat amorphous, meaning things are changing a lot as the story progresses. But we’re happy with what we have so far, which brings us to the next piece of news: we have 3 events coming up in the next few months where we’ll be able to share some of that footage with you all.

May 23-26th  – Dustin will be presenting some footage from the film at the Life is Good Unschooling Conference, in Vancouver, WA. He’ll be on-hand to talk about the status of the film and answer questions. In addition, he’ll also be presenting a funshop called “Let’s Make An Epic Stop-motion Video,” where you’ll have an opportunity to learn the craft of stop-motion. So if you are in the Vancouver area, or are planning to attend the conference, be sure to stop by and say hello.

May 30th - Jeremy has been invited to the 10th anniversary celebration of Village Home Education Resource Center, in Portland, Oregon. For those of you that don’t know, we spent 4 days filming at Village and got some great interviews and footage of the activities. Jeremy will be showing a section of the film that includes much of the footage we captured there. Unfortunately, this is not a public event, but if you don’t know about Village Home, please look them up. Their work is essential and inspirational. UPDATE: Actually, we made a mistake, this event is open to whoever would like to attend, so please click the link to get details and we hope to see you there.

August 22-26th – We’ll also be showing footage and talking about the film at the Rethinking Everything Conference, in Irving Texas. Jeremy will be presenting a funshop all about making independent documentaries and answering questions about Class Dismissed. By then we hope to have even more of the film put together, so it should be fun. Again if you can make it, please come by and introduce yourself.

In between all that, we’re continuing with the editing and also doing some smaller shoots in areas where we need additional footage. So stay tuned for more and we hope to see some of you soon.

Thanks for all your support,

Jeremy, Dustin and the Class Dismissed team.

It’s been a couple of months since our Kickstarter campaign ended and although we haven’t blogged since, things have been far from quiet. Filled with fresh enthusiasm and with a new boost of energy after the campaign, I spent most of December hunkered down at home digging into all the footage we’ve amassed over the past two years. This is a BIG task! We’ve been so busy filming and taking care of all the other aspects of production, that I hadn’t even had a chance to look at some of the more recent footage, so it was a nice surprise to re-visit much of it and get a clearer picture of what we have. Christmas came and went uneventfully, as did New Year’s eve, where I worked right through until 3 a.m, hoping to put a dent in the workload. I’m happy to report that I did make a dent and at the same time got a much clearer picture of where the film is heading and what we still have to do.

One of the difficulties about making a documentary is that there is often no script. Unlike a fictional feature film, where you have a detailed script and storyboards before you even begin shooting, with a documentary you often just have to jump in with nothing more than a great idea and trust that you’re getting what counts as it happens. The story comes later. That’s not to say we had no plan at all, because right from the beginning we’ve had a pretty good idea about what we wanted to do with this film and what is was we were after. One of the great things about this kind of process is that the footage begins to tell you what the story is, once you’ve collected enough of it and once you’ve had time enough to start finding a path through the trees.

So in case you’ve been wondering where we are….we’re still here, finding a path that will lead us through the story towards the finish line. The dedicated time I spent over the holidays sketching out sections of the film and digging into the meat of what we have has really helped forge a path for where we need to go. Certainly, we have plenty more to do, but there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel, so onward we go. Thanks for hanging in there with us.

Our fundraising campaign on Kickstarter has ended and we’d like to extend a big thank you to our friends, family, friends-to-be, strangers and fans all over the world for your support and effort in making this the most successful campaign we have run.

We exceeded our goal by over $3,000 and right up to the last minute people were still pledging their support. Along the way, we made new connections all over the U.S. and found new friends as far away as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England and South Africa. It’s powerful and inspiring to hear from so many people who are homeschooling or thinking about homeschooling and to know that no matter what your approach is to learning outside of the traditional paradigm, we are all a part of the same big family.

So what happens next?

Well, we have a lot of work to do. First off we need to catch up on some administrative tasks, like sending out emails to the many individuals and organizations who contacted us during this campaign. Apologies if you sent us an email and we haven’t responded yet, but we plan to get to it as soon as we can.

For the remainder of this year and into early 2013, we’ll continue to follow our main family in the film as they venture further into their homeschooling journey. But even as production enters the final stages, we’re already tackling the task of sifting through the many hours of footage we’ve amassed over the past 2 years, editing and shaping the structure of the film into what we hope will be a compelling, interesting, informative and entertaining story. This is no small task, but it’s where the magic happens. There’s nothing more exciting than seeing the film begin to take shape. To use a couple of analogies, it’s a little like sculpting. You start with a shapeless lump of rock or other substance and then begin whittling away until something reveals itself underneath. Or it’s like building an enormous jigsaw puzzle in multiple dimensions, you have a big pile of moving images, sound, music, and graphics and somehow you have to decide what to keep and what to throw out, with the goal of making some sense out of apparent chaos. This is the editing process and it’s long and arduous, but it’s one I personally love.

So we’re moving forward at full-speed. We’ll continue to keep you updated on our progress, here on this blog, on Twitter and our Facebook Page and directly through our newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Thank you so much for all your support, and please keep spreading the word about this important film.

Jeremy, Dustin and the Class Dismissed Team

For the past two years, the Class Dismissed team have been criss-crossing the country talking to homeschooling families, experts and advocates from all walks of life. We’ve captured some great stories and gathered a lot of valuable information about homeschooling and other ways of learning outside the classroom. And since January, we’ve been documenting a family who pulled their two girls out of one of the highest-rated public schools in the Los Angeles area to embark upon the journey of taking their education into their own hands. Their story has been unfolding beautifully and we can’t wait to share it with you.

With over two years of the filmmaking process behind us, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. With 75% of the filming complete, we are really pleased with how the film is turning out and can’t wait to begin post-production, then get this movie into film festivals and into the hands of families across America.

But to do so, we need your help. We’ve nearly exhausted our personal resources and still have work to do. That’s why we’ve launched a campaign on Kickstarter; to give us that last push to the finish line.

From the beginning, we always wanted Class Dismissed to be a people-powered film, meaning we wanted to get the homeschooling community involved in whatever way they could. The outpouring of support has been tremendous and we could not have accomplished what we have without you. From all corners of the country, you have reached out to us offering skills, personal time, advice, moral support, and financial contributions.

We’ve come a long way, thanks to the generosity of you and the larger homeschooling community, and with your continued support we’re confident we can wrap up this project!

So please visit our Kickstarter page and help us move closer to the finish line.

September is a time when large numbers of kids all over the country return to school after the summer break. But for homeschoolers this is not the case. Many homeschool families recognize learning happens all the time–it’s not bound by some school districts schedule. But that doesn’t mean they can’t mark the occasion with some kind of celebration. That said, we just got back from LA where we went to check in on the primary family in our film to find out how they were marking this rite of passage, especially since this is their first summer out of traditional school, and therefore their first Not-Back-To-School experience.

On day one, we joined them for a great science experiment in a local park. The experiment began with the girls drawing up a hypothesis about how many life forms they would find in a square foot of grass. But to make it more interesting they had access to a tiny camera that would enlarge anything they found and record it to a laptop. We got some great footage of them digging around and uncovering all kinds of bugs. Who knew Roly-Poly bugs could look so huge! It was a great experiment and so much more fun than doing it a a desk in a classroom.

On day two, we met up with some other homechoolers and baked a Not-Back-To-School cake, which is an annual tradition for these particular homeschoolers. The cake was delicious!

The girls also learned how to fold origami from a six-year old and how to make temporary Henna tattoos. The day ended with some impromptu musical performances.

Last week we spent a very busy 2 days in New York City and Boston. Here’s a recap of some of our adventures. Bright and early on the first day we took the camera into the bustle of the Big Apple to talk to people on the street and get their thoughts on the state of public education. Universally, they all agreed that things are in bad shape, but nobody had any solutions. When we asked them about homeschooling we got mixed answers from the usual “I could never do that” to “sounds like a bad idea” along with a few that thought it was great. Most people however when asked what they thought homeschooling looked like, presented us with the stereotypical image of mom with the kids at the kitchen table and the kids not being socialized. AAhhhhggg, why is this image so prevalent in our cultural psyche? I hope our film can begin to change people’s minds and open them up to the reality that there are so many choices available when it comes to learning outside of the traditional classroom and it doesn’t look the way they think it does.

Speaking of educational choices, we had a fantastic interview with Jerry Mintz from Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO). Jerry has been a leading voice in the alternative school movement for over 30 years and had a lot to tell us about educational choices like Free Schools, Democratic Schools, and the Sudbury and Summerhill models. He’s a wealth of knowledge and had great things to say about homeschooling also.

We also spoke with Lisa Nielsen, author, educator and owner of the Innovative Educator Blog. Lisa’s expertise is in using technology and social media and finding creative ways of integrating them to provide innovative learning tools for the 21st century.  She was filled with brilliant ideas about using all the tools we have available to us in the technological age.

It was a day brimming with fresh and innovative ideas about education and I wish we could have stayed longer, but with a very tight budget and schedule, we hustled out of town at the end of the day and drove to Boston to spend some time with Pat Farenga, author, unschooler and trustee of the legacy of the late John Holt, considered by some to be the father of the modern homeschooling movement. Pat made us really welcome at his home and entertained us with wonderful stories about John and his work. He also very generously provided us with archival photographs, video clips and audio recordings of John in his heyday.

It was a whirlwind of a trip, but so worth the effort. Each of the people we interviewed will add so much dimension and important information to the film. We’re really grateful to them for taking the time to speak with us. I also want to say thanks to Rebecca Israel, a local filmmaker from New York who volunteered her time to help us out, even going so far as to drive with us to Boston. It’s so great to meet people who are as excited about the project as we are. Next, it’s back to our main family for more shooting in May, so stay tuned.

It’s been many months since we released our first teaser trailer and much has happened since then.  We’ve been busy! We traveled to two other states, attended 3 homeschooling conferences, interviewed many more families and homeschooling advocates and after an extensive search, found the main family for the next step of our film. As you can imagine, we gathered quite a lot of footage from all these adventures and we felt it was high time we put together an updated and brand new trailer. So, after many hours of sifting through all this great footage, we’re thrilled to officially announce the release of our new teaser trailer. We hope you enjoy it and that it gives you a good sense of what we’ve been up to for the past several months.

A lot of people have been asking us when the film will be done and I wish we had the answer. We’ve definitely made huge strides in the past few months, but this is still just a tease and not the final trailer for the film. As with making any film, there is still lots to do. We begin filming our main family in two weeks and we’re really excited to be documenting them as they embark on their journey into homeschooling. And we’ve also got a few last minute interviews lined up in April with some amazing people! We’ll be posting more details about those really soon, so be sure to stay tuned by following us on Facebook or Twitter or subscribing to our mailing list. And if after watching the trailer you’re moved to do so, you can help us keep moving forward by heading on over to the donate page of this website and making a donation. Every little bit helps us keep going.

Thanks for hanging in there with us. Enjoy the trailer!

It seems that no matter where you slice the American Pie, homeschoolers can be found sticking out of it! The response to our recent search for a family for our film was to say the least, amazing. From Hawaii, to Alaska and everywhere in between, we received applications from families in all walks of life, from city-dwellers to rural homesteaders, some with one child, some with many, and all of them with different reasons for choosing to educate their children outside of the traditional classroom.

We read each application very carefully and were really moved by the stories people shared with us. I wish we had the time and resources to travel the entire country and film each and every one of the families who applied. It was difficult to narrow it down to just one, but we’re happy to announce that we’ve made our decision. We’ve found a family who are just stepping into the amazing journey of homechooling and over the next few months will be filming what will become an integral and important part of the film.

We’re so grateful to everyone who took the time to apply and to those who helped spread the word and recommended families to us. We look forward to this next step of the film and sharing the journey with you.