This qualitative research article explores how youth create multimodal rhetoric during a service-learning course at a local Youth Media Organization. The study takes a detailed look at how the youth want to gain access to the Discourse of the documentary making process but struggle with the confines of conventions of film as is represented by the professional documentary maker who is their instructor. The research combines sociocultural and cognitive research traditions while investigating the youth and instructor's relationship and interactions concerning the production of rhetoric. (Contains 1 endnote.)