The packed, enthusiastic and responsive audience was a filmmaker's dream.
For the students in Interlochen Arts Academy's Motion Picture Arts program, a room filled with more than 100 of their friends and supporters underlined their creative visions after a semester of hard work. The occasion was the MPA Showcase 2008 held at the DeRoy Commons on campus where a dozen one-minute shorts and three longer pieces took center stage.
First-year students in the Introduction to Production class crafted the silent one-minute stories, using only consumer cameras and no special effects. The mandate was to have only straight cuts between shots.
The topics were as varied as the high school students making them, ranging from making a cup of tea with great precision to a piano recital, sinister elves and their cookie-baking facility to Where's Waldo come to life.
"The one-minute student shorts are the very first step in making cinema and from there they move on to group projects,” said Michael Mittelstaedt, director of the Motion Picture Arts program. "In the spring you will be able to see what they have done since then.”
Introduction to Production students also collaborated to make two longer, final projects for the semester, each four minutes long. Classmates wrote original screenplays and the class selected the two to focus on, which were "Stuffed Turkey” and "A First Meeting.” Tapping the school's wealth of talent, actors from the Theater Arts department auditioned and acted in each production, with scoring provided by Interlochen music students.
The innocuous titles belied the depth, subtlety and dark humor of each film, each of which captivated the audience throughout.
The final film, "Cycle: Unbalanced,” evoked reactions ranging from laughter to terrified gasps to groans of disgust as the murderous mystery set and filmed in a local laundromat unfolded. Returning students — sophomores, juniors and seniors — worked together on this piece.
Director Sara Nimeh, a senior in the program from Lawton, Okla., appreciated the crowd's response to the final cut, which students had sweated over each second of during weeks of production.
"It's different for us because we've been seeing it over and over but it's nice to see everyone else's reactions,” she said. "That's the best part.”
Driven to make movies from a young age, Nimeh came to Interlochen her junior year and has been thrilled with the three-year-old Motion Picture Arts program. She recently won a first place award for a film in the East Lansing Film Festival's high school division and plans a career in cinema.
Taking on the mantle of director for the longer piece was a challenge she relished.
"Directing is different because you have to see it in your head but you have to think of ways to tell the actor without telling them what to do because they have to find their art,” she noted, adding of the meticulous nature of filmmaking. "You have to plan each shot, before you even get to the shoot you've planned everything out.”
Every Motion Picture Arts student was involved in some facet of production for the three longer pieces, from directing and costumes to lighting and producing. The myriad jobs are all in a year's training for a future career making movies.
"To do something like this you have to be a jack of all trades,” said Zev Blumenfeld, a senior from Iron Mountain, who was the screenwriter and editor of "Cycle: Unbalanced.”
Senior Aaron Jaffe of Traverse City relishes the collaborative nature of the medium, which spurs artists to grow in both vision and skills.
"You can't have as much control over everything,” said Jaffe, who plans to attend Northwestern University to study multimedia journalism and film next fall.