Are you a motivated student interested in filmmaking? Look no further: The award-winning filmmaking workshop Mythic Bridge is pairing with The Coalition of Forward-Facing Ellenville (COFFE) to put together the area’s first free workshop for students ages 12-20.

Occurring the weekends of Sept. 23-24 and Sept. 30-Oct. 1 in Ellenville, this unique and inspiring class will teach students how to work collaboratively with their peers, actors and professional studio workers to create a short film in only four days. It seems too good to be true, but Mythic Bridge has been functioning since 2013 and since then has produced 35 short films, one of them even being nominated for an Emmy.

The organization was started by Don Klein and Gage Cass Woodle, who quickly recruited Michael Tosner to join them. The three came into the project with backgrounds in acting or, in Michael’s case, technical and camera support. Since they came up with the concept, they’ve been running the workshop three times a year, first in Brooklyn and then in several other cities.

Their main premise, according to Tosner, is a “connection to professional industry to supplement education at high school [and] bring industry people to mentor. They bring skills to teach kids what filmmaking is all about from a technical to aesthetic viewpoint,” Tosner said, along with focusing on “getting the project done in a short timespan (two weekends), and have a polished project in the end.”

The actors who participate also benefit from the arrangement — they collaborate with other actors and work in a professional studio setting, both of which enhances their portfolios.

Mythic Bridge is in every way a passion project for founders Klein and Woodle, who place an emphasis on making this class free so students of any income bracket can feel welcome to sign up and learn in a highly professional, structured, and fast-paced setting what it is like to shoot a film. The project is not-for-profit and purely donation-based. The organizers are searching for investors to help bring this concept to the next level, allowing them to dedicate themselves full-time to the initiative,

Killing It With Kindness, the Emmy-nominated short film produced by a Mythic Bridge session, is just one example how far this program can go when students put their minds together and collaborate. Students come in the first day of the class and sit down with the mentors and staff to discuss their interests and any current events they think could be interpreted into a storyline for a film. In this case, the students decided to focus on gun violence in schools, with themes of bullying and how a random act of kindness can completely alter the course of somebody’s life. (If you’d like to check the film out, click here.)

After the idea for the story is created, the organizers recruit a board of actors for the film, discuss different locations to shoot at, develop a script and establish a storyboard. It’s an intensive course — all this needs to be completed by the end of the first weekend.

The second weekend is dedicated to shooting the film, with the end of the last day allotted for editing. After tying up any loose ends after the class is over, the film will premiere on Oct. 14, either at the Market Street Studio where the class is held or at Shadowland Stages. If you’d like to see a highlight reel of past Mythic Bridge films, click here.

The films look as professional as they do partly because of the impressive equipment that the project employs, including a Canon C500m Mark II, a $10,000 camera which has been used in numerous Hollywood productions.

Tosner and the rest of the Mythic Bridge team said they would like to thank COFFE for being a supportive and integral part of the project and elevating the arts and quality of life in Ellenville as a whole.

The classes will run from 9 a.m.-6 p.m. on the weekend days listed above. To learn more about Mythic Bridge and sign up, go to their website at www.mythicbridge.org, or check out their Facebook page, Mythic Bridge.