-= NMSU PANORAMA - Summer 2005 =- Hollywood on the Rio Grande

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Hollywood on the Rio Grande

By Mary Benanti '84

New Creative Media Institute at NMSU is launching students toward careers in the film industry

Film studies students RoseAnn Hernandez, Constance Hasapopoulos and Juan Robles at work in the studio at NMSU-Doña Ana.

Sometimes you can see the world in a cup of coffee.

Just ask NMSU Provost William Flores.

"I was having coffee with two alums - Esther Reyes '89, an independent film producer, and Danny Villanueva '61, founder of Univision and Telemundo - and we began discussing the possibility of establishing a film school here," Flores says. "They said we should take advantage of the border and the natural beauty of the Southwest and develop people for work in the film industry."

Flores followed up the conversation with a phone call to award-winning playwright Mark Medoff. Six months later, Flores was talking with Gov. Bill Richardson about how NMSU could develop a film institute.

The rest, as they say, is history. The governor blessed the marriage of filmmaking and New Mexico. And although he made Santa Fe the center of a statewide film initiative, Richardson gave NMSU $2 million to begin its own program. James Hindman, former director of the American Film Institute, has been the consultant on the NMSU project.

The result: This fall students at campuses throughout the NMSU system will be able to enroll in classes that could put them on the road to Hollywood.

Systemwide Collaborative

Photo by Greg A. Mosler

Nathan Rosario works on an animation/digital video project at NMSU-Alamogordo.

A systemwide collaborative is developing that will enable students across the state to complete a two-year associate's degree in creative media technology at NMSU's two-year campuses and either move into the field or segue into courses at the main campus for a bachelor's degree from the newly designed Creative Media Institute for Film and Digital Arts.

"This collaboration can serve as a model for the One University concept," says Cissy Lujan-Pincomb, special projects coordinator and liaison between the main campus film initiative, the two-year colleges and Gov. Richardson's film office. The One University concept is a focus of President Michael Martin that encourages interaction and collaboration among NMSU's different colleges and departments.

Initially the film program will be based on existing courses and build off programs at the two-year campuses, Flores says. Alamogordo, Doña Ana and Carlsbad are already teaching budding filmmakers the art of digital animation, video production and screenwriting.

Alamogordo's Greg Mosier began his digital animation class in 2003. Under the guidance of Rebecca Kongs, a professor and coordinator of digital graphics technology, Doña Ana has started a digital filmmaking course and is laying the groundwork for a film crew training program.

"We have to train film crews," Kongs says. "This is what is going to bring business to New Mexico. Businesses won't come, films won't come and animation won't come if we don't have production crews. And right now, southern New Mexico doesn't have one complete crew."

NMSU-Carlsbad had already partnered with the Carlsbad Multimedia Group to provide community classes in film production, appreciation and history. In the fall of 2004, "Writing for Screen and Television" taught by Mark Buckholz was added to the NMSU-C course offerings. The two-year campus is gearing up to equip several classrooms with cameras and computers in anticipation of a $627,000 grant from the New Mexico Commission on Higher Education.

The main campus in Las Cruces will launch its four-year Bachelor of Individualized Studies this fall. That program will operate under the Distance Education program and the guidance of Carmen Gonzalez, vice provost for distance education and dean of the College of Extended Learning.

Many Career Options

Lujan-Pincomb says students who enroll in the program will have many career options in addition to the movie industry.

"Cinema, in and of itself, is not a profession as much as it is the language of the future. It's a new literacy for the 21st century," she says. "Film and digital media will be used by the leisure industry, theme parks, the defense industry, and the legal and medical professions."

NMSU already has a list of film production credits through its Office of Agricultural Communications, the Physical Science Laboratory, KRWG-TV, and its departments of computer science and English, Flores says.

In creating the CMI, the university brings together a cross-section of disciplines: digital video and animation, theater, art, broadcast journalism, music, computer science, English and education. Its faculty also will come from those varying disciplines, thus adding to the One University concept.

Plans call for each of NMSU's campuses to teach a portion of the CMI curriculum. Each campus will have a specialty course that will integrate easily with courses elsewhere.

"We need to play off each other's strengths, particularly in the areas of faculty and resources," says Mosier, associate professor and coordinator of fine arts photography and art and graphic design at NMSU-Alamogordo.

For example, Mosier says that he could use special software to teach his animation classes via distance education to students anywhere in the system. Thus if a student is having problems, "I could pull up their screen here and help them through the trouble spot. I could use their trouble as a teaching moment here."

Student Goals

Many of Mosier's students at Alamogordo already have their career goals set.

A 3-D character Rosario created.

"I have been interested in computers since I was a kid," Nathan Rosario says while working on a rigging task for his animation class. Rigging is the building of the skeleton system on which animators rely to make characters move.

"I wouldn't mind working for an animation studio or on specials effects for a studio," Rosario says. "You don't have to work for Pixar. You can do your own thing. If it's good, it will sell." (Pixar is the animation studio that created "The Incredibles.")

Classmate Darren Smith says his goal is working with studios that produce video games, an industry that Flores says provides a major career opportunity.

While some may find the finished product the most intriguing part of digital animation, James Scharmack says the rigging is the fun part.

"You use the geometry, you rig it and get animation and it moves," he says.

William Smith says he got interested in 3-D when he was 16. His interest lies more in modeling, or the process of building objects. That's the kind of work done for the film "The Day after Tomorrow." Downtown New York City had to be "virtually" created for that film and then struck by the flooding and finally a snowstorm that covered the city.

Flores and others involved in the developing film institute believe that students from NMSU will one day be at the forefront of creating such worlds.

He knows. He saw that world in a cup of coffee.

For more information: http://distance.nmsu.edu/cmi

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