Film students at Loyola University New Orleans now have access to cutting-edge equipment, thanks to a state fund that aims to expand the moviemaking industry in Louisiana.
A $700,000 grant from Louisiana’s Entertainment Development Fund to Loyola’s College of Music and Media has enabled the university to acquire state-of-the-art cameras, lenses, monitors, lighting and the sort of transformational LED equipment that was used to make the blockbuster show “The Mandalorian.”
“I came to Loyola in 2019, and it feels like the program now is light years from where it was,” said Miles Doleac, chair of Loyola’s digital filmmaking program. “Our equipment holdings now make us competitive with any film program in the Southeast, and maybe even nationally.”
New, high-end RED cameras use global shutter sensors, which vastly improve contrast and make it much easier to shoot moving subjects, such as sports, or shots with multiple light sources.
With new lighting and monitoring systems, cameras and dollies, Loyola students are shooting with equipment that they might encounter on a major Hollywood-caliber production, he said.
Support for filmmakers
The Louisiana Entertainment Development Fund aims to support and grow Louisiana’s entertainment industry and workforce by aiding educational entities like Loyola. The state-funded program is focused on providing tech support for universities so students can find work in the entertainment industry immediately upon graduation.
Sheryl Kennedy Haydel, dean of the College of Music and Media, believes Loyola has always had something special to offer film students, but, she says, the new technical equipment brings them into a whole new arena.
“We think of this as a boutique filmmaking program, with a lot of one-on-one interaction with our professors,” said Haydel.
Loyola’s College of Music and Media is the entity over both the School of Music and Theater and the School of Communication and Design, home of the digital filmmaking program.
“When someone applies, they talk to someone in a professorial capacity in a one-on-one sit-down conversation. We want to do more than just look at a student’s portfolio. We want to get an idea of who our students will be,” Haydel said.
The program has only about 15 people in a classroom, and the senior class this year has 19 students in the BFA program, Haydel said.
“They are the most engaged and committed students I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve been at six universities prior to Loyola,” Haydel said. “We want to give our film students the advantage of having the best tools possible.”
Professionals are instructors
Doleac also considers the film program at Loyola unique, because every member of the faculty has a career making films, with different areas of specialization.
Part of the curriculum at Loyola involves making a film in the first semester. By graduation, he says, students will have made several documentary and narrative films, along with a thesis film between 11 and 20 minutes long.
Also, students work as paid interns on Doleac’s films, in jobs from camera assistants to set dressers, so often they emerge from the program with both practical and professional credits.
Doleac is excited about one piece of equipment in particular: a volume wall with LED technology that provides virtual set design.
The LED volume walls produce their own light, so actors are lit realistically and actors can see their surroundings, even though nothing is there. It’s a technological leap over a green screen, where video is added afterward.
“When the volume wall arrives, that will take us to an entirely different level,” Doleac said. “Suddenly our students will have the ability to write screenplays that are actually shootable here in the city, with locations they can acquire.
“So, if you want to be in the Amazon, or the Sahara, or a ‘galaxy far, far away,’ you can do it.”
In fact, Doleac said, even driving shots through the city become much simpler using the volume wall because there’s no need for a trailer pulling a car, or permits to block off a street.
“Because of the interactive quality, the volume wall is there while you’re shooting,” Doleac said.
Digital revolution
Digital filmmaking has completely changed the film industry and traditional filmmaking, he said.
The 1939 Oscar-nominated film the “Wizard of Oz” was one of the first films shot in Technicolor, and it contained elaborate special effects.
“The cameras back then were 400-500 pounds,” Doleac said. “To expose for those cameras the lights had to be incredibly bright. You hear stories about how the temperatures on that set were over 100 degrees. To borrow a line from a Quentin Tarantino film, it’s not the same league, not the same ballpark, not even the same sport.
“In terms of the ability to capture an image, there’s just no contest. This new generation of low-light cameras makes all the difference in the world.”
According to Haydel, the grant allows a huge step forward.
“Otherwise, we’d feel like we were hobbling together this film program, buying one camera at a time,” said Haydel. “That takes forever, and at that slow pace, by the time you finish buying the latest technology, it has already changed.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-18 00:00:00
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