The Creative Media Institute provides a class on feature filmmaking, where students have the opportunity to get real-world experience in making a movie. Their current project, “The Santa Assist”, will be available for streaming during the Christmas season in 2024.
The purpose of the class is to teach students how to make a movie in a hands-on way. Rather than learning in a classroom, the students learn by working.
“I think the best way to learn film making and how to make a movie is by doing it,” explained assistant professor and Director Ross Marks. “So they’re actually going to learn by doing so they’re taking on jobs because it’s an actual feature film, with actual funding behind it and actual distribution and actual professional actors.”
The jobs students take on in the class cover almost everything that needs to be done on a movie set. This allows students to focus on the area of filmmaking they’re most interested in.
“So we have students working on the film in the area of production in the production office, we have students in art direction, costume design, locations,…students doing gripping and gaffing and camera operation and assistant camera…So really everything that it takes to make a movie, we have kind of divided the students into those different areas,” Marks said.
By giving students these crew positions, the program teaches them what it’s like working on a TV set. Production Manager, Nicole Rodarte, explained why she enjoys this aspect of the class.
“Being able to actually work on a real movie set is my favorite part of the class. I feel like that’s a really valuable learning skill, at least for digital filmmaking. I feel like there’s no better way to learn than that to be honest,” Rodarte said.
Students also learn how to work with professional actors. Although all the production positions are manned by students, the actors are hired professionals. Some actors are even award-winning.
“One of our actors is Eric Roberts, who’s an Academy Award nominee and his wife Eliza Roberts… so we’ve got a professional cast. Jonathan Stoddard, who’s one of our leads and Alexandra Harris is another lead,” Marks explained.
While the class offers real work experience, the class is also a big time commitment. Hales explained that the class takes up so much time, it’s the only class she’s taking this semester.
“We get between 12 and 15 hours of credit, depending on exactly how much we signed up for. We were told at the beginning, ‘If you’re going to take this class then this is the only class you can take this semester,’ it’s an entire semester,” Hales said.
Marks also commented on the time commitment the course is for the students involved.
“They probably end up putting in more hours into this class than an entire semester’s worth of classes for all their classes. So it’s a lot of hard work,” Marks stated.
Despite the time commitment and hard work required, students say it’s all worth it because of the connections it gives them.
“One way [the class is beneficial] is just making connections with people you could be seeing out in your field, which I think it goes to say for any sort of CMI, creative media, any sort of those classes in that institute, you can just do a lot of stuff and make a lot of connections for your future,” Bundy said.
Additionally, students also receive an IMDB credit for working on the film. This looks great on their resumes and may assist them in getting jobs in the future.
“They’re already up on IMDb, the International Movie Database, where they’re going to have a professional film credit and a film that will have distribution so they’ll graduate with credit on their resume which will give them a leg up on most college students and graduates,” Marks said.
