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Passion, fun spur student filmmakers |
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Thursday, 01 November 2007 |
 Meg E. Hanna, a senior interdisciplinary studies major, works in the video editing lab in Edwin Duncan Hall Tuesday. Photo by Anna Donlan
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by NIKKI ROBERTI
Intern Lifestyles Reporter
Lights. Camera. Action.
While the multi-million dollar industry may seem out-of-reach at first thought and Hollywood may be 2,350 miles away from Boone, the excitement of making the movies is present on our campus.
Meg E. Hanna is a senior interdisciplinary studies major with a concentration in documentary studies.
She said her interest in film began when she received a camera for her birthday in high school.
She hasn’t been able to put it down since.
“It was during this time that I began to realize how interesting and entertaining real life could be,” Hanna said.
After seeing “Bowling for Columbine,” although not a huge fan of
Michael Moore, Hanna said she became hooked on non-fiction filmmaking.
“The idea of taking real life and turning it into a piece of art by
cutting it up and mixing it around was really exciting for me,” she
said.
Jeff Goodman, an instructor in the department of curriculum and
instruction, agreed the field of filmmaking is exciting as a whole and
especially in our day and age.
“This is a very exciting time for filmmakers on campus. The equipment
for shooting and editing quality programs is widely available and
relatively easy to use,” Goodman said. “We couldn’t have imagined this
abundance ten years ago.”
Part of the success and rising interest in filmmaking is due to the
many sharing venues available such as the Internet, Goodman said.
Web sites like Youtube, Myspace, and Google make it easy for those
interested in film to not only view others’ work, but to share their
own as well.
Hanna recommends that students interested in filmmaking upload their work online.
“The Internet is the future and the now,” Hanna said. “If you can say
‘hey, here is my Web site with my films on it’ then that puts you one
step ahead.”
However, online is not the only place that students can share their cinematic work.
Appalachian Student Filmmaking Organization (ASFO), or more commonly
known as Film Club, meets every Thursday at 6 p.m. in the Watauga River
Room of Plemmons Student Union.
The organization’s main goal throughout the year is to organize and run the Open APPerture Short Film Festival held each March.
ASFO president Austin A. Sava is a senior English film studies major.
He said while the film festival constitutes as a main duty of the club, the group does much more than just organize the event.
“The second part is that we make short films, we watch and critique
films, and from doing so, our knowledge of cinema grows so that we can
make our own films better. We do technical workshops on equipment as
well,” said Sava.
Like Hanna, Sava sees filmmaking as taking real life and turning it into art.
“There is a famous quote from the French director Jean-Luc Godard: ‘I
make films to make time pass,’” Sava said. “This really rings true for
my life. I walk around and view the world in a cinematic way. I see
everything around me as a film. Our daily lives are films waiting to be
shot on camera to show the world.”
The last film Sava directed was a short film for the 48 Hour Film
Festival in Greensboro during the summer. Sava’s group won the award
for Best Dialogue.
Like that success, filmmaking as a whole is team activity.
“Most important, you need to be able to work with people, as making
movies requires many hands,” Goodman said. “This is one of the reasons
filmmaking is taking off at ASU right now: there is a vibrant,
enthusiastic community of people here who want to help one another do
creative work.”
Dr. Beth Davison is an associate professor in the department of
sociology and social work who is an advocate for the growing future of
the filmmaking community at Appalachian, specifically for
documentaries. She is in the process of presenting the idea of an on
campus documentary center to the administration.
“Documentary centers have been around for decades,” Davison said. “The
closest documentary centers to Boone are the Duke Documentary Center in
Durham and the Appalshop in Western Kentucky.”
The center would benefit many proposed departments including
documentary studies and productions, the communication department,
curriculum & instruction department, Appalachian studies and the
Belk Library Digital Media Studios, as well as the APPerture Film
Festival.
Possible services of the center would be technical instruction on
filming and editing, promoting awareness of ethical consideration and
education about copyright issues, workshops and classroom instructions
about the technical skills involved and general consulting with
students and faculty on their projects, Davison said.
“If students could channel their media interests into thoughtful and
developed representations of coursework, they would have provocative
illustrations of learning to share with classmates, teachers, and
future employers,” she said.
Davison plans on making a formal presentation to the administration at the end of the year.
“No one has been discouraging about the idea,” she said. “I’m sure the
administration will need time to consider whether to start a center and
would love to hear from the campus community about the idea.”
Goodman also believes there is a future for student filmmaking at Appalachian.
“I have every reason to believe that the filmmaking community at ASU
will continue to grow, and I’m looking forward to being pushed by
student interest to push our programs to evolve,” he said. “There are
so many issues to be tackled and stories to tell, and we owe it to the
world to use our minds, hands and resources - and our strong community
- to create work that moves people.”
Sava said the power behind cinema is why he is so passionate about what he does.
“I honestly feel that in today’s world, cinema is a very important
tool. It can reach countless people throughout the world expressing new
ideas. I see it all around me everywhere I go,” said Sava. “There are
stories out there just waiting to be told, and I intend to search them
out.”
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