By Debbie King
Published January 2024 Southaven Magazine
The film industry is young, but opportunities abound in Southaven.
Southaven is a long way away from the major movie and television studios in Hollywood and New York City — 1,812.8 miles from Hollywood, to be exact, and 1,102.5 miles from the Big Apple, where most of the entertainment industry work is done. But inside the walls of Southpoint Church on Stateline Road in the city’s original business district, there is movie magic being made there by talent right here in DeSoto County almost every day of the week that could stack up against the best movies and television shows currently playing in the cinemas.
Award-winning director and filmmaker Robb Smith, known professionally as Robb Rokk, founded DeSoto Arts Institute in 2016 as an outlet to provide support, mentoring, and training to youth and young adults looking to learn the film industry with an emphasis on producing family friendly content. Students receive hands-on training and experience in every aspect of film production from story conception to screenwriting, to acting, directing, sound, music, visual effects, all the way to the post-production and editing process — all done using professional equipment.
No matter where their interests in filmmaking lie, Smith says there is a role for them on every DAI film project. “We walk them through the whole process,” he says. “All of that. As a writer and director, I have the canvas and a paint brush. I hand them the paint brush and they have unlimited opportunity to do the most beautiful strokes on the canvas.”
Smith grew up in Memphis and was a movie buff from an early age. He was enthralled with movies like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and American Graffiti. His father had a Super 8 movie camera and captured home movie images of the family on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River on the sand bar driving their dune buggies. While he wasn’t allowed to touch the camera, Smith says he began paying more attention to how movies were made.
“I would drive my dad crazy,” he says. “We would watch the ABC Monday Night Movie. My dad would get so annoyed with me because I would say things like, ‘Hey, he just lit that cigarette and it was in his right hand. Now it’s in his left hand.’ He would be like, ‘Boy, how did you see that?” I didn’t understand the behind the scenes, but I knew what I was seeing.”
Ironically, Smith never attended film school himself. He was working in web design when one day a friend at church approached him about making a music video. “He said to me, ‘I hear you are creative. Do you want to make a music video with me in Nashville?’” Smith says. “I was like, sure.”
The production was a three-minute video for the song “Crank the Hank” that featured a barnyard, line dancers, motorcyclists, and four-by-four trucks out muddin’. Using a borrowed boom from church — or what’s known as a “gib” in movie production lingo — they set up in a barn in Gallatin, Tennessee, and shot from 8 a.m. until 1:30 a.m. the next day.
“It was cool. I really liked the process,” Smith says. “But what I enjoyed the most was the storytelling aspect.” Word got around in Nashville following that shoot and the success of the video, and Smith went on to make more music videos with smaller bands. He was also invited to teach a music video production course at Nashville Film Institute.
Smith found himself out of work when his IT job at an architectural firm was outsourced. He went away to a week-long summer camp for kids in Texas, which gave him time to ponder what his next step would be. Smith says he felt that God was telling him not to worry, that he would take care of him. He had barely finished showering on the Monday after getting back from camp, when he sat down at his computer and the phone rang. It was a client with an offer to do a web site design.
“That day, they wrote me a check for the full job,” Smith says. “That was almost a month’s salary. Then, before I even finished that, I got another one. I saw the handwriting on the wall, so I kept designing websites.”
Work offers then came his way to run sound on some short films and projects for HGTV and ESPN. Smith says working on those projects was like a crash course in directing and producing. He watched everything that was going on, from the cameras they were using to the equipment used to set up the shots to the lighting and the sound.
“I was starting to learn the lingo, things as simple as the gib or the boom and the crew positions and watching what they do,” Smith says. “When I was running sound, I could hear the actors talking. I could hear the director whispering to them, telling them okay, in this shot I want you to walk up to that actor and do this.”
Then at night, Smith says he would go home and read books and manuals about film production and watch tutorials on line. He began playing around with graphics and video editing using Adobe Creative Suite. “I already owned my own camera,” he says. “I would put dots on my arm and film my arm. Then I would go in and use Photoshop and make them look like a cut wound. So I started learning more things.”
A friend who was working as the VFX editor on HBO’s True Detective Series and other projects like The Outsiders invited him numerous times to come out and visit him in Los Angeles and New York to ride around on the camera car for background shots around the time he was unemployed and trying to figure out his next step. Smith says he always turned him down because he didn’t want to live in LA or New York. He finally did visit him in Atlanta though around 2015 where they were filming A Walk in the Woods with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.
“We spent the day inside the building on the set watching Robert Redford and Nick Nolte,” Smith says. “That was pretty cool. I got to see things on a much bigger scale than I had been messing with. But I was like, ‘I can do this.’ I know I am a story teller. I come from a long line of them. So I’ve got that.”
Smith filmed his first short film in 2015 using his own video production company, Rockwell Video Productions, called And Thus It Ends, a story about a kid who is walking home in what looks like an apocalyptic world. “He’s going through his monologue about zombies and things like that,” he says. “He’s imagining this on his way home. And then his friend jumps out and scares him. It turned out kinda neat.”
But it was his church work with Colonial Hills that Smith says led him to find his true calling — teaching film to students. Smith has been heavily involved at Colonial Hills Church for over 30 years serving in roles as a worship leader, youth pastor, and mentoring kids in the worship band. He says working with the youth made him want to stay connected to young people.
He thought he could best accomplish that through film. “I thought, I will just start teaching what I learned in film,” he says. “I really think God called me to do this.” He asked Colonial Hills if he could have a room one night a week. “A couple of nights we had 45 or 50 people show up sitting in big circles,” he says. “It was very basic because I didn’t know a ton at the time.”
Smith began looking for a bigger space, one that he could afford to expand his little film club that would have room for a studio and a classroom where students could shoot and edit their projects. His prayers were answered when he got a call from SouthPoint Church, who knew about his work, asking if he was looking for studio space. He couldn’t afford the $1,800 a month asking price of most of the places he had looked at on Getwel Road around the airport. Those were too noisy anyway because of all the air traffic.
Smith said he told himself that if they came close to his price range, he would take it. “I walked in here and looked around and was like, I can turn this into anything I want,” Smith says. “I had a number in my head, and I thought, if they say within $50 of this figure, I’ll take it. They were $25 inside my number.”
Smith’s little “Film Club,” as he called it, started with about 40 students in 2016. For some, it was a hang-out space. For others, it was a place to learn how to make films. Students could pursue whatever role that interested them from acting to directing to working behind the camera or on other equally important jobs like lighting and sound.
“The list just goes on and on,” he says. “I’m a jack of all trades, a master of none. I know a little bit about every job.” The students at DAI soon began turning out award-winning work. Their film On Edge, a story about a man standing on the ledge of a building contemplating suicide, made it into the Top 10 at the Memphis Film Prize. The next year, their film The Game, about sex trafficking, almost landed the top prize. “We were told we missed winning the Memphis Film Prize by single digits in the judge’s voting,” Smith says.
Another aspiring filmmaker, Jessiah Burnett, heard about the work being done at DAI and joined the team as program director in 2016. Burnett had been making videos for about five years, but mostly the kind you find on YouTube. He heard about DAI through Facebook right after they made On Edge.
“I was looking for something to kind of get into the actual film industry, some type of job training program,” Burnett says. “I went with two of my friends to check it out and see what it was. I just never left.” Burnett has directed a few of his own short film features, X Number of Words and more recently, Magnetic, but his talents lie more on the logistical side, scheduling, casting, and organizing the shoot.
Two more award-winning short films — Outside Arcadia and Truth Lies Upstream — told Smith and Burnett what they already knew — that there is indeed talent right here in Southaven and North Mississippi to make movies that rival those being produced at top film schools like Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and NYU.
“We have a lot of young people around here wanting to get into film,” Burnett says. “A lot of people who come to us don’t understand that they can make videos at a high professional level. That’s why we started this, to show them that they can actually make high-quality films right here and learn the basics of filmmaking. There are other groups out there in Memphis doing this kind of work, but they are not like us in that we help them get out there and make their own films and are equipping them with all of the skills they need to serve on a real film set. There is really nothing like this in the whole Memphis and North Mississippi area.”
Smith created the DeSoto Film Festival, which is now in its third year, to showcase the films of DAI students and to expose audiences in North Mississippi to the work being made here in their own community, as well as other cinematic short film gems featuring some of the best filmmaking and story-telling from around the world in a family-friendly setting.
At the end of this year’s festival, Smith handed out certificates to the 30 graduates of their new Film School 101. Burnett says he has no doubt that there are young aspiring Steven Spielbergs, George Lucases, and Sofia Coppolas right here in DeSoto County and right there on that stage.
“Definitely,” Burnett says. “But also a lot of what we are trying to do is create an ecosystem here where we want them to build projects here and film them here in Mississippi. Smith and Burnett plan to continue to expand the program and are always on the lookout for donors willing to sponsor a student in the program. DAI was recently notified that they received a $110,000 grant from the Mississippi Art Commission. The money will be used to expand their film studio, add more classrooms, and to construct a new 3,000-square-foot stage.
Smith says there is a ton of talent in the area and he hopes that someday directors and producers in Hollywood will seek out their graduates. “We get calls from directors looking for people to work on shoots all the time,” Smith says. “When our students are out there looking for jobs in the film industry, I want directors to say ‘You went to DAI?” and they will know that our students have the skills to do the job. I own the camera. I own the lights. We do VFX. We have the skills and do all these things. If we had more money just to cover some expenses, there is nothing stopping us.”
But aside from the training, for Smith, DAI still remains a ministry. He is using film as way to build relationships with young people and to instill ethics and respect for each other so that they stay true to their Christian faith.
“Everything we do here we view it as a ministry,” Smith says. “The word ministry doesn’t fly in a secular environment today. You start freaking people out. But here, it’s about relationships. It’s about respect. We talk here all the time about building relationships and communicating honesty and integrity and ethics and just shooting straight with one another. We help people help each other. I am encouraging them to make a difference in the world.”