August 18, 2005
Lights, camera, learning: Digital Arts Center’s film is a class by itself
Eleven-year-old Olivia Spokoiny takes a few steps forward through shadow into an area of sculpted light, ever ready for her close-up.
Slowly, she opens a small case, takes out a glittering bracelet and fits it over her wrist. Then she crouches down, opens a wooden drawer and removes a sketch in pencil or charcoal, which appears to be of her. She looks at the drawing a moment, replaces it in the drawer, stands and walks softly away — ready to do it all again.
Zooming back from the scene, so to speak, reveals that Olivia is the center of bustling activity in a darkened building at the retired Sandpoint Naval Air Station. A cameraman stands nearby shooting in digital video format, a boom operator holds a big, padded microphone (called a Zeppelin) over the girl’s head and various other crew members sit, stand or crouch just out of the light. From the darkness a voice calls “Cut!” which breaks the breathless silence of the scene.
They’re making a movie, of course, and a full-length feature at that, complete with several locations, experienced actors and post-production special effects. It’s a cinematic adaptation of George MacDonald’s 1871 children’s novel At the Back of the North Wind, about a sickly young boy (played by Kellan Larson, who, having filmed late the night before, was not on the set this day) and his friendship with the magical Lady of the North Wind, who takes him on adventures.
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| Director Noel Paul discusses a scene with Olivia Spokoiny, who plays Nina in At the Back of the North Wind. Paul, a doctoral student in Digital Arts, also wrote the screenplay. |
But this movie won’t likely play at the local multiplex anytime soon. Its production is focused more on education than entertainment. The project is wholly the creation of a summerlong class called Digital Arts 456: Production Studio, offered by the UW’s five-year-old Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media — a place where art and science meet up in myriad innovative ways.
But how is this different from, say, a local film club shooting a script? Richard Karpen, professor of digital arts and the center’s director, fields the answer: “There’s a huge difference. They aren’t shooting a movie, in a sense — this is a 400-level, intensive course, with expert instruction. So the director is actually the teacher.”
That director is Noel Paul, a doctoral student in digital arts who has had experience with a few other films before this and adapted the novel for the screen. The 27 students who make up the class fill out other roles on the production and design teams, most doing such work for the first time in their lives. Several professional actors are volunteering their time to participate in the production, too, which helps create a professional-quality experience for the students.
In her way, even Olivia Spokoiny is teaching, too. An experienced young performer with several musical comedies and plays to her credit (she’s been in The Sound of Music twice already, she admits happily), she knows how to behave on a film set: Do what’s needed, over and over if necessary, and always be ready for more. Unasked, she even helps out this shoestring production by shining a needed flashlight on the clapboard when a camera assistant calls out the scene number. “Thanks, Olivia!” Paul says.
The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS for short), Karpen explains, is a place where artistic inquiry and expression can meet and meld with aspects of science, design and technology. “It’s a groundbreaking program internationally,” he says with pride.
“We are actually a group of artists, and a program for making art, but faculty group interests are deeply involved in engineering and the sciences.” After all, Karpen says, cinema has always been a collaborative art form, linked with science and technology for its delivery.
Though the digital arts embrace computer animation, sound art, design computing, media arts, robotics and all points leading toward the future, Karpen says, “for this summer course we decided to do more straightforward cinema.” Special effects will be added in post-production — after the filming and well into the fall quarter section of this class — and will account for about one-quarter of the film’s total effort, he says. “In a normal course it’s probably 75 percent digital production.”
Back in the warehouse, the afternoon’s scenes take place in the cabin of a boat, though it doesn’t look like a boat cabin from the outside. Blue-tinted “gels” are clothespinned to the back of thin wooden planks that make up the set walls; the “interior” is decorated with various nautically-themed knick-knacks as well as crayons, a radio and a skull wearing a red baseball cap. From several feet back the set looks chaotic and unreal but a glance through the camera’s viewfinder shows a well-framed and delicately lit image — and sure enough, it really looks like the cabin of a boat.
When At the Back of the North Wind is finished, there may be a free campus screening or a get-together for cast and crew to watch and celebrate, but that might be all. Far from worried about this, director Paul seems almost relieved: “I’m a graduate student, and I am free from thinking about the future of this film,” he says. “All I and my students have to do is try and make something that we are proud of, and see what happens after that.”
As for his experience in directing this virtually all-student project, Paul said it was educational for him as well. “It’s always a surprise to see how the movie changes and develops as you commit it to tape,” he says. Then he adds, “Every time you make a film, it’s like your first film. I think you write a movie at least three times. Once when you write it, once when you shoot it and once when you edit. Every time it takes on a new life of its own.”
Paul praises the diverse group of students creating the film, saying, “It’s so wonderful to see people with absolutely no filmmaking experience whatsoever — there was none required for the class — realizing that, ‘Hey, I can do this,’ and see them step up to the plate and take on responsibilities that are huge and far-reaching — and they become good.”
As for Olivia Spokoiny, who has been doing this sort of work ever since she was 8, it’s just a chance to get more experience. What’s the hardest part? “Being patient,” she says calmly. “Some shots take a long time to set up.”
