From desk to the bigscreen
Abbey Theatre to screen the work of student filmmakers

By Ken Wright

A movie reel sits on the bar at the Abbey Theatre earlier this week. Next Tuesday, Dec. 14, the Abbey will host the Fort Lewis College Student Film Night. The evening will feature 15 short films made by students as well as a 25-minute documentary by FLC professor of film Kurt Lancaster./Photo by Todd Newcomer

"This is not Hollywood-formula style," says Fort Lewis College professor Kurt Lancaster. "I'm teaching them to be independent filmmakers, even if they never make another film in their lives."

And even if they never make another film, Lancaster's students will get to know the thrill of an opening night for their films. Students from Lancaster's fall video production and documentary classes will screen their projects at a Student Film Night at the Abbey Theater on Tues., Dec. 14, at 8:30 p.m., and the event is open to the public.

Student Film Night will feature at least 15 shorts, running three to seven minutes each and offering a mix of fiction and documentary styles. The night will conclude with a 25-minute film Lancaster himself directed and produced called "Folding Paper Cranes." The film profiles Leonard "Red" Bird, a Durango poet who has written about his experiences as a soldier subjected to tests in the 1950s on the effects of nuclear blasts. Bird is now battling cancer, which he claims was a result of those experiments.

For the students, Student Film Night is "a chance to show their work to the public," says Lancaster. For those who attend, he adds, it's "a fun night watching fun films."

For Abbey Theatre owner Brad Merlino, hosting the event is a no-brainer: "We promote independent film. What better way than to give young filmmakers a place to screen their films? This is what we do."

The course in video production is "a very demanding class," says Lancaster. "We cram a year of film class into one semester." Students learn to write scripts, act, direct, do lighting, and shoot, edit and produce films. In a nutshell, students learn "visual storytelling," says Lancaster.

"I don't expect great acting," he adds, "but I want them to get the blocking that tells the story. The hallmark of good directing is you ought to be able to cut off the dialogue and still follow the story."

Students learn the "film palette," the visual elements, says Lancaster. Exercises include turning a comic book sequence into a filmed scene, then doing a "risk-taking" segment. "To be an artist, you have to take risks," says Lancaster. "You have to put something of yourself, the artist, into the work. You have to tap into your own experience."

Among the short films that will be screened next Tuesday are: Erik Jensen’s “Malus”; “The Scent,”a work of short fiction by Lisa Morgan; a cowboy short by student Katie Holmdahl; and “Let It Go,”a short film by Rachel Beckelhymer.

Students learn the "film palette," the visual elements, says Lancaster. Exercises include turning a comic book sequence into a filmed scene, then doing a "risk-taking" segment. "To be an artist, you have to take risks," says Lancaster. "You have to put something of yourself, the artist, into the work. You have to tap into your own experience."

"Risk-taking" exercises that became shorts include a narrative of a mock suicide, another that dramatized the experience of a student learning of her brother's death, and one that took a cinematic look at a student's failed love relationship.

In the video production class, students shoot both a fiction short and a documentary film. In the documentary class, students focus on that one 4 genre, first analyzing documentaries in detail, then eventually producing their own films. Among the documentary shorts from that class are a film about a group of female motorcycle enthusiasts from Durango attending a motorcycle rally in Mexico, a profile of a local one-armed rock climber, a look at Southwest Colorado's cowboy culture, and an exploration of the dating scene in Durango.

Michael Gustafson, a senior English literature major, took Lancaster's documentary class as an elective, but ended up loving the class. "The main thing I got out of it is an appreciation of the documentary," he says. "They're amazing. I can't get enough of them now."

Gustafson's group shot a documentary that attempts to look inside Durango's homeless community. He says he and his partners chose the topic for the effect it could have on the audience. "If one person volunteers at the Manna Soup Kitchen after seeing our film," he says, "then we've done our job."

This fall's Student Film Night is the second of what Lancaster hopes will be a semi-annual event. The first took place last April, and more than 200 people attended, he says. Only 10 years ago, though, such an event would not have been possible, he adds. Before the mid-1990s "digital video revolution," he explains, it would've been much too expensive to produce student films. With digital technology, though, all filming and production work can be done with affordable equipment and film. The film alone, says Lancaster, 10 years ago would have cost $50 for two minutes; today a digital cartridge costs only $8 an hour - and the product is broadcast quality.

Lancaster made such digital productions possible at Fort Lewis. A co-author of the how-to book " Building a Home Movie Studio and Getting Your Films On Line ," Lancaster has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU. His dissertation was published as " Interacting with Babylon 5 ," a study of the internet culture that arose around the TV sci-fi show. He went on to teach at MIT, where he became interested in independent filmmaking. There he also produced an on-line film, "Letters From Orion" (see the film at www.lettersfromorion.com) before coming to Fort Lewis College two years ago.

When Lancaster came to Fort Lewis, the video program needed upgrading, he says. All the equipment was analog and outdated. So even before he officially started, he wrote a proposal for new equipment, and volunteered for two months to upgrade the collegeequipment to digital. Now there is even a full computer lab on campus dedicated to digital video production.

Still, at NYU or MIT, even with state-of-the-art equipment, there couldn't be an in-town Student Film Night because New York City and Cambridge are so big. "That's one of the advantages of teaching film in a town like Durango," he says. "In a small town, you can do a student screening, and over 200 people will show up." ☯