Film and Television Arts

Jessica Davis: The next generation of Oscar nominees has to come from somewhere, and Boise State University is just a small part of a growing entertainment industry. I’m your neighborhood reporter Jessica Davis, getting a behind-the-scenes look at the moviemaking magic here at BSU’s film department.

Tucker Hogan: Ready, and action. I think the coolest thing about being director is just really being able to think about an idea that you have and try and communicate that to other people.

Jessica: Lights, camera, action. Students at Boise State University are learning the needed skills to be the next Steven Spielberg.

Darius Dawson: Feel free to give notes, right? This is a teachable moment, a learning moment, just uh using tactics and as ifs, uh just kind of how do you actually direct the actor? How do you occupy space with the actor?

Jessica: Darius Dawson is an assistant professor specializing in film production. His students are practicing spacing, directing, and production for their final projects.

Tucker: So what I am doing today is uh directing a scene from a short film that I wrote called Haruspex. Uh, it’s about witches, it’s about finding acceptance in who you are as a person. We are kind of blocking the scene, directing it, so that when we do eventually shoot here in a couple weeks, we’ve got a really clear idea as to what we want and what we’re looking for. This whole scene, you’re trying to snatch the power away from her.

Jessica: Tucker Hogan is a junior at BSU with an emphasis in screenwriting. He says his film Haruspex is the first script he’s written from start to finish that he’s also directing. BSU film department grows each semester with students finding their voice through the camera, audio, directing, and overall production, creating the next generation of world-class filmmaking.

Student: The thing about music performance is that you just do the performance and that’s like it, you don’t get a do-over. So I like that you could just keep doing film over, you can keep like getting the performance that you want from actors and stuff. Um, and I think that’s just super fun to me.

Jessica: There are many ways for you to see some short films that were shot by BSU students, whether it’s Treefort or the Boise Film Festival, just to name a few. I’m your neighborhood reporter Jessica Davis, reporting for Idaho News 6.

Text on screen: Boise State University’s Narrative TV Initiative is a one of a kind program that brings together faculty, students, and industry professionals to create an original television series.

Leslie Durham, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences: The TV initiative was the brainchild of Ryan Cannon, one of the film professors at Boise State. And as soon as he started talking about it, I knew it was something that we just had to figure out how we could do.

Ryan Cannon, Department of Theatre, Film, and Creative Writing: So we had, it’s a four-semester structure, so we start with a writer’s room, which is a fairly small group where they come up with a show.

Ben Wieland, Creative Writing Major: We would just work on our episodes and we would try to make it like a, like a traditional writer’s room in the sense that for each group, we had a showrunner. And then that showrunner kind of delegated out tasks and kind of led the discussion for the writer’s room for each, each group.

Ryan Cannon: And we took one of those shows into pre-production where students did all of the kind of logistical and creative work to get the show ready for production.

Sarah Smith, Media Arts Major: I was a part of the producing team, so scheduling, budget, all that, seeing it all come together in the end and be ready to actually go into production, which is awesome.

Ryan Cannon: So that when we moved into the third phase, production, is essentially we just, we roll camera for 11 or 12 days, it’s about two weeks of production. All of the work that they’ve been doing in the writer’s room and in pre-production comes to a head during production and we just pretty much shoot the show at that stage. And then the final stage is post, and they edit the show, they do the audio work, they color grade it, and get it ready to be distributed.

Josh Schneider, Theatre Arts Major: I mean, at the end of the day, that’s where it’s all supposed to end up, right? Like, at the end of the day, like when we, when we leave here, when we leave Boise State and we go to make something, that’s what we’re going to be trying to do in the real world anyways, right? So I mean, why not start that now?

Chard Klautsch, Chair, Department of Theatre, Film, and Creative Writing: It’s remarkable, it’s what I got to say. I get very excited about it because we had theater arts students, we had film production students from the communication department, we had creative, the writer of the series was a creative writing student. They all came together and were working together last May, I think it was right when we shot the series in May at various locations here in Boise. And so fantastic to see all of these students coming together, creating this thing that we are actually going to show to people.

Text on Screen: On March 13, 2018 “And Beyond” premiered at the Egyptian Theater in Boise, ID. Over 75 individuals from across campus and in the community worked on the project.

Scenes from film: She wants you gone. You know, if the show doesn’t look right, who’s going to believe it? I don’t want to be rude, but at this point, it seems like very little could be considered beneath you. If the public wants to see the supernatural, they’re going to have to confront some harsh, sticky truths. No substitute for a truly gifted medium. We can’t move forward until you admit that you’re a fraud.

Text on screen: “And beyond” an original series