On a typical warm, sunny Los Angeles day, Timothy Chadwick had an atypical day in the back of a car.  

Chadwick, a fourth-year undergraduate in the College of Arts and Sciences, was working as a production assistant intern on the set of La Serenata, a feature film adapted from Ernesto Javier Martínez’s children’s book and short film.  

But the boom microphone operator had called out sick, and the crew needed a backup. Chadwick, a cinema studies and psychology double major, crawled into the back of the car with a boom microphone, ready for his Hollywood moment.  

“It was the most fun scene to be a boom operator in because of the logistics of being in the back of a car,” Chadwick says.  

Chadwick was one of four CAS undergraduate students who spent three weeks in Los Angeles over the summer to help film scenes for the upcoming feature film La Serenata by co-writer and producer Martínez, a professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, and co-writer and director Adelina Anthony.  

Elise Prentice (cinema studies, BA ’24), Diego Solorio (senior, cinema studies and political science) and Gwen Gray (senior, cinema studies and advertising) worked alongside Chadwick on the film. While on the set, they shadowed members of the crew and tried out various positions on the film set, from directing to costume and set design, giving them a taste of what goes on behind the scenes of a movie.  

“It reaffirmed what I already know: I want to spend every day of the rest of my life on a movie set,” Solorio says. “I'm already looking for the next project, whatever it is.”  

Lights, Action!

What began as a children’s story Martínez wrote about the Mexican cultural tradition of romantic serenades has transformed into a larger story exploring themes of love and exclusion.

Martínez and Anthony have spent the past few years developing the story into a feature film that explores what it means to be a part of a cultural tradition that might exclude someone. In this case, the film addresses queer exclusion from the Mexican cultural tradition of serenading another person as a romantic gesture. It also explores how the sincere affection between two innocent boys can become a clarion call for an entire community’s desire for safety, inclusion, and justice.

“As queer Latinxs, how do we go about reclaiming a tradition that may have, at some point, excluded us?” Martínez says.

The story has evolved as its medium has changed. In the children’s book When We Love Someone, We Sing to Them, Martínez says, the story teaches the tradition of serenading someone through song via the innocent experience of a boy who wants to serenade another boy. In the short live action film La Serenata, the story expanded to address more mature themes, such as school bullying and parents negotiating how to support queer youth.  

“The general principle in our work is how do you not dumb down the world for kids, but how do you also teach possibility and futurity and joy?” Martínez says. “When we were circulating that short film to meet the needs of communities wanting to have more loving conversations intergenerationally, we submitted to a film festival that we didn't realize had a connection to HBO.”

That connection inspired Martínez and Anthony to develop the short film into a feature-length film, which the two wrote during the pandemic, expanding the short film’s storyline and characters.

“There are new characters, new character arcs,” Martínez says. “We came to re-understand who our characters were and where they could take us.” 

The story comes alive 

To bring La Serenata to life, Martínez and Anthony enlisted four CAS undergrads to help with on-location filming in Altadena, California, about 15 miles from downtown LA. As production interns, the student received a crash course in working on a feature film—and played a valuable role in keeping things running smoothly on set.

“We needed them in ways that we didn’t anticipate,” Martínez says. “They were there when things went wrong and people needed to jump in.”

On the film set, no two days were the same. Solorio recalls making community flyers for a scene’s background one day, and another day he and his student peers created aesthetics to match the cultural identity of a working-class Mexican American family. “It built a whole world,” he says.

Building that world also means having costumes and jewelry that match a character’s identity.

Prentice says she learned from costume designer Stacy I. Macias about the importance of a costume’s minute details in a film. 

“What kind of queer identity do they have, and what does that mean to them, and how does that affect them, as well as, like, their relationships with others?” Prentice says. “How do they carry themselves through the world just based on a T-shirt?”