Documentary Film
Came From Nothing
I co-produced this film with classmate Ali Yildirim as part of a project studio course titled "Sweet Auburn: Birthplace of Ideas." The course was led by Professor Nassim JafariNaimi, who also serves as the director of the Design and Social Interaction Studio at Georgia Tech. My role in the production of the documentary was primarily filming and editing. We premiered Came From Nothing at the APEX Museum on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta on May 4th, 2017 to a crowd of over 100 people.
Came From Nothing chronicles the life story of Benjamin "Big Mouth Ben" Graham, an entrepreneur and motivational entertainer who owns a convenience store on historic Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. Big Mouth Ben overcame 17 years of addiction and homelessness on Auburn Avenue to open the store just two blocks from the same bridge under which he once slept, and one block from the birth home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Came From Nothing aims to do justice to Ben’s remarkable, vibrant story of resilience by capturing it, aesthetically and thematically, in all of its depth and complexity. The Auburn Avenue community takes great pride in Ben and his wife Tanya’s accomplishments, and appreciates their ongoing social justice efforts. The film further highlights and honors those efforts.
Explore documentation of my design process for this project below. The process book also documents a second project, a work of typographic design based on the words of Maya Angelou's iconic poem, Still I Rise.
Georgia Public Broadcasting's Celeste Headlee interviewed us about the project on her daily news program On Second Thought. Click Here to listen to the interview.
