Student Movies and How to Make Them

The semester is almost over and there’s often little time for movie-going at this time of year with all the other activities and arts performances going on. The last time I got out to a commercial movie theatre was a couple of weeks ago for the digitally recorded performance of the San Francisco Opera’s “Don Giovanni.” Although it was a recording of a live production rather than designed as a movie, which takes some getting used to on a big theatre screen, it was still an impressive production. This past weekend I didn’t have time to see their “Madame Butterfly.”

High-definition digital theatrical projection is an ideal medium for bringing this type of event at modest cost to towns that would rarely if ever see professional concerts, plays, and operas. (Interestingly enough, this was the same prediction made for 35mm film technology over a century ago.)

Unfortunately, Carmike Theatres, which is bringing the San Francisco Opera recordings to Grand Forks, is doing virtually no advertising of the fact, and the advertising that they actually are doing has been consistently publishing times in the newspaper (and for at least one week on the official corporate website) that are not the actual times the theatre is running them! It comes across as if the theatre and the corporate headquarters are intentionally conspiring to keep attendance low so they can justify discontinuing the series.

Students in my movie production class have just one more week to finish shooting and/or editing their semester projects. Then, during finals week the evening of Tuesday, May 6, both they and the general public will get the chance to see them all on the big screen at the historic Empire Theatre in downtown Grand Forks. Showtime for the mini-festival starts at 7:30 p.m., and there will be a $3 admission charge for people not in the class.

Once the demands of classes ease, it will be time for anyone with the urge, the vision, and/or the equipment to start working on their personal movie projects. Screenwriting students can use the summer to shoot those feature-length scripts they just finished. I hope I’ll be able to shoot another feature of my own this summer, as I’ve done the past seven years, or at least become involved in making someone else’s feature-length production. I’ll remain pretty busy until mid-summer, however.

The past two summers, North Dakota playwright Kathy Coudle King and I have spent the first part of our vacations co-teaching two-week moviemaking workshops for teenagers, co-sponsored by the UND Departments of English and Visual Arts. They were so enthusiastically received by the participants and their families and friends that we’re offering the “Summer Movie Camp” for young people age 12-18 again during afternoons the middle of this June. The screenwriting week will be June 9-13 and the production week will be June 16-20. Cost is $180 for the full two weeks, but individual weeks may be attended at $75 for the screenwriting and $125 for the actual movie production.

Due to numerous requests, we are trying an additional two-week workshop designed for adults age 18 and over. This one will start right away the week after UND’s final exams, running the evenings of May 12-13-14 for the screenwriting portion, and the evenings of May 19 through 23 for the production portion. Details and registration forms for both the adult and teen workshops are on line at http://www.english.und/edu/moviemaking.htm with tentative class materials outlined at http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/cjacobs/SummerMovieCamp.htm . Costs for attending are the same as for the teen workshops.

The finished movies for both the adult and teen movie workshops will be screened at the Empire Arts Center in another min-festival the afternoon of Sunday, June 29. Again there will be a $3 admission for the general public.

In between the two two-week moviemaking workshops at the University of North Dakota, I will be conducting a more intensive one-week screenwriting and movie production workshop at Jamestown College the first week of June. This is part of the college’s second annual “Dakota Spirit” writing workshops held on campus. I’ll have more details on that workshop soon.