How one district turned an ordinary building into an extraordinary opportunity for students
Primary Topic Channel: Multimedia
At the end of a dimly lit corridor in the heart of the Academy of Information Technology and Engineering (AITE), a 450-student public high school in Stamford, Conn., a student stares into a camera lens. The wall behind him is plastered with dull green paper ripped from a giant spool in a nearby art classroom.
Two feet away, one of his classmates stoops behind a tripod, barking orders. He fusses with a small handheld camcorder, as a third student stands on a chair in a futile attempt to optimize the overhead lighting.
It might not look like much, say the students--not yet. But very soon, this ragtag movie set will be the birthplace of a short film chronicling a police inspector's globetrotting pursuit of a notorious jewel thief. Like the blue screens made famous by big-budget Hollywood blockbusters such as the Matrix trilogy, George Lucas's Star Wars, and other largely computer-generated classics, the unremarkable green backdrop serves as a sort of digital canvas, enabling the students--each of whom is enrolled in a class designed to teach the finer points of digital media arts--to test their creative boundaries.
Once they've captured the scene before the backdrop, the production team will hunker down in a nearby computer lab, where they'll employ a combination of software programs to digitally set the scene's surroundings--in this case, using Apple's Final Cut Pro software to drop in cultural images associated with several African nations, creating the appearance of a manhunt on the Serengeti.
At first blush, the production might seem a little crude, and--students will be the first to admit--the conditions are anything but optimal. But even amid such straight-to-DVD surroundings, they say, the skills they're gleaning through the use of these and other technologies at AITE will better prepare them for the future, a future in which blue-chip employers--including several of Hollywood's foremost production studios--are as committed to recruiting tech-savvy employees as they are to pleasing their shareholders.