Citizen Wayne is one part cinematic journalism and and one part character study, chronicling interesting stories, people, and places from Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana.
Citizen Wayne has come a long road. What was originally conceived by our friend Andrew Welfle as a local radio show in the vein of This American Life but for Northeast Indiana eventually morphed into the videos we began producing for the Young Leaders of Northeast Indiana with help from Lincoln Financial Foundation in mid-2012. For too long, Citizen Wayne was an idea and a name without content or a home and we’re grateful to breathe a little life into it again.
But what’s the point? Informing community attachment for one. Our own worst enemy at home has been a negative or uninformed self-perception of ourselves and our own backyard and we think this can be answered by doing a better job of telling our own stories. The Knight Foundation’s 2010 Soul of the Community Study listed community attachment and openness as “opportunities to prioritize” and we couldn’t agree more.
As far as production goes, we made a conscious decision to walk softly and carry a big lens, because these aren’t meant to be commercials. YLNI has commissioned six of these to run into 2013, but we may just end up making more.
Episodes are produced with a skeleton crew (sometimes just one person), with an emphasis on the subject and their environment. Interviews and visuals are also acquired separately and we’ve made a conscious decision to avoid featuring talking heads. We want glimpses and moments that reflected the stories, city, and region we love.
And we hope you dig Citizen Wayne.