Tarleton/Dawn Productions won the silver Telly Award for Online Diversity and Inclusion, with Identity, episode eight of their series Kids Matter.
Husband and wife team David Tarleton and Adria Dawn founded Tarleton/Dawn Productions in 2004. This is their third Telly Award in two years.
The Telly Awards, the world’s largest honor for video and television across all screens, this year boasted nearly 13,000 entries from across the globe, the most in a decade.
Kids Matter is a fiction short film series shot entirely within the Chicagoland area, made in collaboration with middle and high school aged actors that focuses on contemporary topics that our youth face today, that aren’t always easy to discuss. Identity focuses on gender identity, inclusion and chosen families with LGBTQ youth. Student’s explore what pronouns they use and why or why not they want to be labeled or use labels to define themselves and others. Past topics for Kids Matter have included cyber bullying, peer pressure, mental health awareness, and gun violence in schools to name a few.
“This film could not have happened without the steadfast support of our partners, Stacey Flaster and Liz Fauntleroy of The Performer’s School in Highwood, IL,” Dawn said. “When we joined forces with The Performers School and created Revealing Media Group, the company we all created for Kids Matter, we knew we were about to go on quite a journey.”
“We love collaborating with the youth talent at The Performer’s School. This film was really special to us because our cast was so vulnerable and brave,” Tarleton said.
Identity was an official selection at the Awareness Film Festival in LA this year, as well as playing at The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, and other film festivals. Identity also just took home “Best LGBTQ Film” with The Paris Film Awards and was also named a “Best of the Fest” with the Pride Film Fest earlier this year.
Kids Matter is educationally distributed across the globe with four distributors, including Learn360, Clickview, McIntyre Media and Alexander Street. Each film comes with a facilitator guide for different levels of learning.
This year, Help, episode five of the series, can now be found on Cook County Against Hate‘s website as a resource to help with the stigma around mental health in teens.
Unsafe, episode seven of the series won “Best Ensemble” and “Best Narrative Short” with the New York Socially Relevant Film Festival in 2020.
“We go into each film with an idea for a topic and the kids improvise and contribute to the project by sharing their stories in a safe space, along with their ideas around each topic,” Tarleton says.
“This series has been so special to me and the bonds we all collectively get to make with each other with each film has been magic. I wasn’t sure when we did the first episode nine years ago where this project would lead us to or how much it would grow. I’m thrilled that it speaks to people, and that we’ve been lucky to make eight films thus far. We aim to give voice to underrepresented youth and I feel honored to get to do that. Kids have a lot to say. they want to be heard,” Dawn says.
Tarleton/Dawn Productions’ latest work has been leaning heavily into social change topics. Karen, their Black Lives Matter film, and Gray Area, about alcohol addiction, also both won Telly Awards in 2022. Tarleton and Dawn co-direct together, with Tarleton as DP, and editor, with Dawn focusing on performance, and serves as the writer on almost all of their projects. Both produce.
“We both bring different things to the directing table that seem to mesh really well together. We both are looking at setups and picture and all that, but we focus on different sets of things,” Tarleton says.
Tarleton met Dawn in Los Angeles in 2000. Dawn, an actor in TV/Film out there and Tarleton had just finished up his MFA from USC. Since then, the duo has gone on to make equity plays, music videos, feature films, and many short films. SInce arriving in Chicago fourteen years ago, the couple has made over thirty films here.
“We are so lucky to get to make films with the wonderful talent in the Chicagoland community,” Dawn went on, “We are moving to New York next month and will miss this vibrant pool of creatives.”
Tarleton will serve as the new Chair of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University. Dawn will teach acting at the University, and continue to act and create work.
Stayed tuned for what’s coming next with Tarleton and Dawn. We wish them well.
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