Category Archives: Film

Great Teacher Award Recipients Announced

Earlier this year, the Art Center Student Government, together with Student Affairs and the Provost’s Office, together reinstated an annual Great Teacher Award.

The relaunched and revised awards will be presented annually at Summer Term graduation to one full-time, one part-time and one new faculty member, beginning at next week’s ceremony. The recipients are determined through a nomination process open to all enrolled students and a confidential selection committee of students.

The awards are sponsored by the Provost’s Office and Art Center Student Government, and coordinated by Student Affairs. We’re pleased to announce the Great Teacher Award recipients for 2011:

New Teacher:
AFFONSO BEATO
Undergraduate Film Department

Part-Time Faculty:
ERROL GERSON
Humanities and Design Sciences Department

Full-Time Faculty:
HEIDRUN MUMPER-DRUMM
Graphic Design Department
Product Design Department
Humanities & Design Sciences Department

Student Government has requested that Heidrun Mumper-Drumm deliver the Summer 2011 Graduating Class Commencement Address on August 20. The ceremony will begin at 5 p.m. and will be immediately followed by Graduation Show.

Congratulations Affonso, Errol and Heidrun!

Art Center is also taking nominations for the 2011 Art Center Alumni Awards, presented annually at Fall Term Graduation. The Alumni Awards provide Art Center an opportunity to publicly recognize the talent, service and design influence of our alumni.

Nomination categories are: Lifetime Achievement, Outstanding Service and Young Alumni Innovator. Please send all nominations to the Alumni Relations office, alumni@artcenter.edu by Oct. 15.

Students Win Big at the ADDYs


Advertising students Adam Chang, Melissa Ploysophon, Becky Ginos and Jack Collier, in collaboration with Photography and Imaging student Jeremy Jackson, recently won a gold and two silver ADDYs for their work at the local ADDY Awards, the first of a three-tier, national competition.

Chang and Ploysophon went on to beat out over 1,000 other entries from across the country to win a National Gold ADDY for their Atomic Fireballs campaign. Film student Ian Kammer won a gold for Boxer.

Congrats on these well-deserved honors!

Film Students Receive Honors

Our undergrad and graduate film students have been busy—several have garnered awards and recognition for their work recently.

Two Film students won Young Director Awards at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival: Y-C Tom Lee for his AIDS public service announcement and John X. Carey for his Voices From the Field documentary.

The Association of Independent Commercial Producers held their annual AICP Awards Show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on June 7. Numerous film schools across the country competed in the Best Student Commercial category, and seven of the 10 national finalists were current Art Center film students. Undergraduate film major Ian Kammer won the highest honor— Best Student Commercial—with his North Face: Hibernation spot.

Other Art Center student winners included:

Undergraduate Film:
Gevorg Karensky: Adidas – Impossible Is Nothing
Y-C Tom Lee: Gatorade
Ted Marcus: Laphroaig Scotch Whiskey – Winter Revel

Graduate Broadcast Cinema:
Erik Anderson: Red Bull — Small Can of Big Whoop-Ass
Paul Linkogle: Band-Aid – Beginnings
Michael Lutter: Roaring Lion Energy Drink (shown above)

Congrats on these well-deserved honors!

Art Center at Night Instructor on New Book, Film

Art Center at Night instructor Robert Mehnert recently completed the cinematography of Jinn, a supernatural thriller written and directed by Art Center Film alum Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad.

Jinn is based on the Middle/Far East myth of the Jinn, a race of beings that occupied the earth long before mankind evolved. The problem is that some of them want the world back for themselves. The story follows Shawn, the one man who can save humankind, on his quest to save mankind from a terrible fate.

The planned release date is this Halloween. Mehnert and Ahmad have worked together on three other films.

In a departure from the world of motion pictures, Mehnert has written a series of books, the first of which, Looking Down at the Sky, is now available on Kindle from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com. An adventure in time and alternate reality, the story tells the story of a brilliant mathematician lost in a mysterious earthquake—only to wake in her own bed, discovering that seven years have passed.

Visit Mehnert’s website at bobmehnert.com.

Student Film Wins Art Directors Club Gold and Cannes Award

The following post about Voices From the Field, which we’ve featured here earlier this year, is from the Designmatters blog.

Guest Blogger John X. Carey (Film Department, 8th term) is the recipient of the 2011 Young Director’s Award from the Cannes Film Festival as well as the recipient of the Art Director’s Gold Cube Award for his film, Voices From the Field.

Designmatters put me and two of my fellow classmates at Art Center College of Design into a real world re-branding situation as part of a TDS studio last spring with an international aid organization called Project Concern International (PCI). Kyle Murphy (Film), Jeremy Jackson (Photography & Imaging) and I pitched the idea of shooting a film in Africa about the humanity that PCI was working with everyday and the client decided to go with the idea.

Flying to Africa for a week and shooting the film and subsequently editing the 40 hours of footage down into a digestible five minute commercial pushed me way outside of my comfort zone but I couldn’t help but come away with a fresh perspective on my career, the world, and my place in both.

Our resulting film, Voices From the Field, went on to win an Art Directors Club GOLD Cube, which was a really gratifying way to cap off the entire experience.

Jeremy and Kyle were such amazing students to work with on the film. The job called for them to be both particle technicians and highly creative artists, and they were able hold both in the palm of their hand flawlessly.

The fact that I had such a good crew is just a testament to Art Center and how amazing the students are here.

I highly encourage people to investigate Designmatters and meet the program Director Elisa Ruffino and Vice President Mariana Amatullo, who are two of nicest people I know.

They spend their days helping Art Center students use their smarts, social status and personal voices to better mankind.

Cannes Palm d’Or Winner Edited by Art Center Faculty

Terence Malick’s new film Tree of Life has won the 2011 Cannes Film Festival Palm d’Or Award, the festival’s top prize. The film was co-edited by Art Center Film Department instructor and mentor Billy Weber.

Tree of Life is the story of a Midwestern family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son (played as an adult by Sean Penn) through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (played by Brad Pitt).

Weber earned an Academy Award nomination for editing Malick’s Thin Red Line as well as one for editing Top Gun. His many editing credits include Nacho Libre, Miss Congeniality, Bulworth, Days of Thunder, Midnight Run, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, 48 Hrs and Beverly Hills Cop.

He directed Josh and S.A.M. and served an associate producer on The New World. He is currently editing Madagascar 3 for DreamWorks Animation. Congrats!

Joe Dante to Speak Thursday

Undergraduate Film Department instructor Allen Daviau will host famed director, producer and editor Joe Dante to campus Thursday for a lecture and Q&A.

Like many directors of his generation, Dante began his career with Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in the ’70s, starting as a trailer editor and soon directing hit films for New World and then the majors.

Known for his vivid, highly inventive visual style, Dante directed such films as Piranha, The Howling, Twilight Zone: The Movie (segment three), Gremlins, Explorers, Innerspace, The ‘Burbs; Gremlins 2:

The New Batch, Small Soldiers, Looney Tunes: Back in Action and the upcoming Monster Love.

This event is open to all Art Center students, alumni, faculty and staff.

Distinguished Filmmakers Series: Joe Dante
Thursday, April 14, 1 p.m.
Ahmanson Auditorium

Tonight: The Visual Language of Herbert Matter

Don’t miss tonight’s screening of The Visual Language of Herbert Matter at Hillside Campus.

Herbert Matter was a mid-century modern designer, photographer and filmmaker.

Originally from Switzerland, he moved to New York in 1935 and worked with such legends as Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock and Charles and Ray Eames. This documentary looks at Matter’s life and work.

The screening is free. Check out the trailer below.

The Visual Language of Herbert Matter
Thursday, March 31, 7 p.m.
Art Center Hillside Campus
L.A. Times Auditorium

Matter Teaser from Herbert Matter on Vimeo.

Special Documentary Screening: Allen Daviau

Don’t miss a special screening and Q&A session this afternoon with
 British documentarian John Henderson about his work-in-progress documentary based on Art Center faculty member
 Allen Daviau.

E.T., Daviau

Henderson has been creating a series of in-depth documentaries about the world’s great cinematographers, and the first film in the series is about famed cinematographer and Art Center instructor Daviau.

Allen’s first feature film was E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, earning the first of five Oscar nominations and launching his career as one of the industry’s leading cinematographers. Since then, he has worked on such notable films as The Color Purple, Falcon and the Showman, Empire of the Sun, Avalon, Bugsy, Congon and Van Helsing. He has been nominated for three American Society of Cinematographers Awards, winning twice, and has received the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award. Stop by and meet the legendary cinematographers who will be attending the screening, including Vilmos Zsigmond, Haskell Wexler and Owen Roizman. The event is open to all Art Center students, alumni, faculty and staff.

Special Documentary Screening: Allen Daviau
Thursday, March 24, 1 p.m.
Ahmanson Auditorium

Owen Roizman: The Craft Behind the Art

“You have to learn the craft in order to perform your art.”

Good advice from famed cinematographer Owen Roizman, speaking at Art Center last Thursday as part of the Film Department’s Distinguished Filmmaker Series.

Roizman got his start in the business at a young age. His father was a cinematographer for Fox Movietone News, and he spent summers working at a camera rental store, where he became adept at threading film, taking apart cameras and putting them back together, and understanding the uses of various lenses.

After college Roizman sought employment in his chosen field—physics—and was dismayed to find the profession paid so little. He discovered he could make much more money working as an assistant cameraman, and a career was launched.

He ended up filming some of the world’s favorite movies: The French Connection, The Exorcist, Network, Wyatt Earp, Tootsie, The Taking of Pelham 123, True Confessions and many more.

His first film, Stop, was shot in Puerto Rico with a meager budget of $300,000 and was never released. From that, he got the job shooting The French Connection. Subsequently, he was known as a “gritty New York street photographer” even though he had never shot in that style prior to working on that film.

He expounded on some cinematographer’s tricks he used during the filming of that film, including how he force developed and underexposed the film to thin out the blacks and make them more milky.

His advice to students?

  • “Always do your best work: When this is edited together, no one will know it is 3 a.m. and you’re exhausted.”
  • “You always have to do the best that you can. You can’t let yourself fall to tiredness.”
  • “Whatever is on the screen, that’s you. That’s what counts.”