Ashley Ellis, Cofounder, Emerald City Arts : Creative arts for positive change

Emerald City Arts is a production company for film, music, and visual arts. They produce creative and commercial projects in order to affect change around the world. YourStory caught up with Ashley Ellis, a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles, California and just finishing up graduate school at the University of Southern California who is the cofounder of Emerald City.

Tell us more about Emerald City Arts.

Emerald City Arts is my latest project; it’s a production company for film, music, and the visual arts, which aims to break the limitations of genre and foster collaboration across all mediums of the arts as well as bring talented artists together. It also exists to affect global positive change, through the work itself but also through the structure of the business. For that reason, I’m building the company as a social business.

What kind of creative projects do you have in mind?

For the moment, we’re focused primarily on film projects, but we are by no means limiting ourselves. A lot of what we’d like to do involves hybrid media and arts projects; we want to be pioneers in this industry and do what hasn’t already been done. We’re also constantly looking for new ways to utilize and involve the web. Our audience is global, and we realize that there’s perhaps no better way right now to reach that whole audience. Right now, we’re working on documentary films, music videos, and a reality television program. We’re also in the beginning development phase of a fiction film and music album. Yikes, that’s a lot.

What was the idea behind this initiative ?

The City was really a natural progression and an almost necessary entity in order to bring together a bunch of different projects and ideas that I was already working on. I found that with each doc film that I took on, I established a long lasting relationship with the non-profits that I was working with, and frankly, I was spreading myself too thin and not as effective as I wanted to be. So the company has allowed me to streamline my efforts into something more cohesive and sustainable. After I came up with the initial concept, I reached out some incredibly talented individuals, each with skills and interests that somehow complement mine, and brought them on board. They’ve become The City’s leadership team, and it’s because of them that the company even stands a chance at taking on such a broad range of projects successfully.

You want to use creative arts as a tool/medium for social change. Do you think its an effective tool ?

Absolutely. The arts exist in order to reflect and comment upon the world around us and in order to make people think. So, if we can make people think, then there’s no reason that we can’t take it a step further and inspire them to act. If I didn’t believe in this, then I don’t think that I could be as passionate about film and the arts as I am. In fact, I can point to several films that at points in my life had that very effect on me, so I know that it’s possible. What’s even more exciting about Emerald City Arts is that it’s a social enterprise, so hopefully we’ll be able to leave a tangible mark on the world too, assuming that people are receptive to and support of the work that we do (and that we make a profit).

What do you work on other than Emerald City?

Separate from working on my film projects, I love working with organizations that bring people together or inspire positive change. I started an organization at USC called Always Living in View of the Environment and am an active member of Sandbox, a global network that brings innovators under 30 together in order to provide them with resources to achieve amazing feats across every field.

Check out Emerald City Arts here : http://www.emeraldcity-arts.com/