Fifth Floor Studios pioneers a limitless playground for Black storytelling

Wynton Jones, Dara Adedara and Kennedy Hill, founders of the student production company Fifth Floor Studios, are that rare combination of friends who can also work as a well-ordered unit. Sitting on the roof of the old Annenberg building, they banter for a while before attentively listening to each other describe their experience as young show creators, praising one another along the way.

Their harmony seems attached to the comfort they’ve been forced to foster between each other. The three juniors met on Flour Tower’s Somerville (now located in Pardee Tower), USC’s special-interest floor geared toward Black students, in 2019, living in close quarters before being sent home. Living with a mélange of Black students from various places and with different backgrounds created a freshman year floor where something was always going on.

“A lot of different things happened at Somerville,” said Jones, a junior majoring in theatre with an acting emphasis. “There were a lot of different conversations and just a lot of different entities and personalities.” 

They spent much of their time reminiscing on pre-coronavirus Somerville, describing the affinity floor as chaotically amusing. But Jones’ description of life in quarantine after leaving Somerville is very much the opposite.

“We really loved living there,” Jones added. “[But] there was a lot of ups-and-downs [when] the year of COVID that came and hit, and we were stuck to our homes and stuck to a very restricted environment.”

Instead of languishing in quarantine, the trio recognized their experience’s narrative potential, deciding to share them with their new web series, “A Black College Show,” and creating a production company to support the show and any other future projects they’d come up with. They initially intended for the show to mimic the spectrum of characters and discourse that occurred on Somerville. Eventually, though, they realized that an episodic series would require them to take on much more cinematic license, not just for the story’s sake, but for the well-being of the real people who lived on the floor. 

“It’s kind of invasive to people who live there and we’re not going, ‘Yo, is it okay if I use what happened to you?’” said Hill, a junior majoring in acting. “But more [so] just paying homage to what we experienced.”

It’s safe to say that the show, which debuted on the Fifth Floor Studios website and YouTube channel on Nov. 24, is much more than a mimicry.

Hill, who was responsible for writing the show’s script, crafted cohesive fictional portraits from seemingly sporadic sources with a platform she treasures just as much as a millennial — Pinterest. She created a mood board for each and every character, pulling an archetype out of every one of them.

“​​I started making Pinterest boards — mood boards — for every single character and really zoning down on who they were as a person,” Hill said. “Then kind of putting what people see in them as their stereotype like ‘Oh, they’re just a suburban Black girl’ or the ‘white-washed Black girl that never had no Black friends’ or the ‘artsy girl that listens to Frank Ocean and was like super shy.’”

Despite her vivid characterization, Hill had little to no experience writing a series before embarking on “A Black College Show.” It was her acting background that allowed her to make the characters’ voices more authentic, she said.

“Being an actor and reading plays, you have all these like different voices in your head,” Hill said.

Hill’s co-collaborators have equally rich ties to acting. Jones and Adedara, a junior majoring in theatre with an acting emphasis, faced no shortage of difficulties serving as the show’s director and producer, respectively. Acting in the show while handling these roles was the greatest source of dilemma for them, as expected by the trio who are also fans of Issa Rae, the writer and actress known for her balancing of acting, writing and producing her HBO series, “Insecure.” 

By the end of the 2020-21 school year, Hill finished the show’s script. She and Adedara arrived in Los Angeles shortly after. Their living arrangement was much different from their freshman year in Fluor Tower though; they spent their time in L.A. sleeping in Jones’ room in Icon Plaza where most of the series was filmed. 

Adedara’s job as producer was especially grueling in many ways. She describes late nights fixing call sheets, endless time stressing over how they’d feed their cast and maintain coronavirus regulations and recouping film locations. She ironically completed all this while portraying the character of Ayo who’s described as an always on-point, bubbly and high-maintenance “Naija baddie” by the show.

Similar to Rae, Adedara found that simultaneously starring in and producing a show is a task she never wants to dive into again. Still, she says the challenge was worth it.

“I would love to just produce a project or just act on a project, but I think taking both on at the same time was a little difficult,” Adedara said. “But I like doing things above what I think I can do.”

Rae’s impact was a common thread throughout the conversation. The trio unanimously agree on her inspirational power, and her imprint makes sense — just like Rae, Jones, Adedara and Hill are making it a priority to showcase Black joy with “Fifth Floor Studios.” It’s also not lost on them that Rae produced her own show in college — they’re proudly following in her footsteps.

“I think that that’s our main goal as a company — is to not tell stories surrounding Black trauma,” Jones said. “I think we’ve all had enough trauma stories, just Black trauma, we want to see more joyful experiences. And so that’s kind of where the production company came about from us.”

After Hill crafted the script, the heavy-lifting turned to finding actors to bring “A Black College Show’s” characters to life. Naturally, the artists were surrounded by a plethora of other Black creatives and already had people in mind who aligned with the characters tacked onto Hill’s mood boards. For the majority of the casting, though, they sent out a traditional call-sheet and interviewed actors. 

“Somebody sent [the casting call] to PettySC, the big Black group chat, so we got a lot of response from that,” Jones said. “It was very communal.”

Although they were limited to the pool of willing Black USC community members to act in their work and to extras who were near campus during Summer 2021, Adedara, Jones and Hill were determined to represent a real and underrepresented phenotype of Blackness. 

“Even looking in television, the only time I would see someone who looks like me — darker skin, plus size as well … they would be in very stereotypical roles [or] sassier [or] they would have no storyline,” Adedara said.

The trio pointed out that the implicit biases of many School of Dramatic Arts professors often deny students of color the opportunity to take on principal roles. Their frustrations with casting in their own academic program made them even more concerned about providing a space for dark-skinned actors to be showcased as more Black students enter USC.

“Many more Black people have been getting in as of late, and I’ve been hearing so many more instances of racist things happening to them,” Hill said. “They don’t have an outlet or people to talk to and  it’s so sad.”

Although the weight of pioneering roles for incoming students is difficult to manage, Adedara, Hill and Jones believe the main people who helped them carry out their mission was their cast. The three creators emphasized how grateful they were to their actors for bringing their best work to set, even though much of their opportunities to rehearse were on Zoom. 

“Thank you to all the actors. They really pulled through,” Jones said. “If we had people who were even slightly incompetent, I don’t think that we would have made it.”

For Jones, directing was exhausting due to both the frequent 12-hour workdays and their limited experience with the practice. They say it felt as though the entire project rested in their hands at times.

“The whole thing about being a director is that you have to be there for every single scene. So there’ll be times when [Hill] and [Adedara] can go sit and not be doing anything at the moment, but I will always have to be there when the camera’s rolling. That was difficult,” Jones said. “Because it was my first time there was a lot of experience that I did not have. It was simple things like [understanding], ‘Oh, this looks weird or you can’t do that.’ All of those little roadblocks.”

Seeing other people invest in Fifth Floor Studios mitigated some of the learning curves and frustrations that came with it. Adedara described moments of relief such as when students living in Icon offered their own home after their initial filming location fell through or when her mother came over to cook for the cast. 

Jones also thanked Hill and Adedara for their assistance on set. While Hill’s job ended at writing, she spent her time on set launching the show’s marketing. Before filming had even wrapped for “A Black College Show,” the group uploaded their first TikTok introducing the show’s concept. A TikTok they posted just six days ago had racked up 424k views and 115k likes at time of publication. A quick look revealed a comment section filled with praise and declarations of show loyalty. The account, @fifthfloorstudios, has 15.1k followers.

Jones described seeing young Black creatives and consumers across the United States, some they personally admired from afar, engage with their videos as a “surreal” experience. For the trio, the outpouring of support they’ve received is affirmation that the risks they’re taking are very worthwhile. As young Black artists, they can’t help but feel, not just pressure to succeed, but an obligation to be great.

“​​My parents are very traditional. They’re Nigerian, and they’re very hands-on with me,” Adedara said. “Trying to convince them to let me major in theatre was really hard, but acting is something that I just love to do.”

For Jones, “A Black College Show” is an answer to a deeply personal question. A lack of opportunity on this campus almost taunts them, and Jones wants to prove to themself that if people won’t give them opportunities, they won’t simply disappear. 

“Instead of waiting around for someone else, we took the initiative to be like, ‘We’re gonna do it for ourselves.’ It’s been a really good decision that we all made,” Jones said. “From that, we gave ourselves our own experience. We give ourselves connections with others through Fifth Floor [Studios]. In the future, we can continue to use it as our playground.”

While these students acknowledge they shouldn’t be forced to make their own opportunities at a school with so many resources, they’ve found a bright side — creating their own work has allowed them to delve into roles they wouldn’t have typically been able to. Three students who could easily be boxed into the role of actors gave themselves ownership over their creative profile. It’s a message that they want to pass on to Black people, no matter the field they’re in — that they can dominate any industry they pursue on their own terms.

Fifth Floor Studios, at its root, isn’t about Adedara, Jones and Hill. It’s about and for supporting Black excellence, or at the very least, Black opportunity. It’s a mission that the creators hope to immortalize and provide access to for generations of Black USC students to come.

“I think dominating every field that we are in, I would just love for the message of that to just transcend over creating a television miniseries or creating a production company or just acting,” Adedara said. “I think that it can transcend into any facet that we put our minds to.”