DAILY LOBO new mexico
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tuesday
March 27, 2012
The Independent Voice of UNM since 1895
Digital film courses open career doors
QUICK DRAW
by Miriam Belin
mbelin08@unm.edu
Jeffrey Hertz / Daily Lobo
Caricature artist Adam Pate draws student Valerie Arellanes in the Student Union Building in under a minute’s time. Pate is one of the fastest caricaturists in the world. He visited UNM on Friday, and completed about 200 drawings of various students walking through the Student Union Building in less than three hours. Pate, who has been drawing professionally out of Cleveland, Ohio since 1997, is on tour and plans to stop at 100 colleges per year and draw hundreds of faces at each one. Although he focuses on drawing caricatures, he also does impressionistic painting and digital art. “Drawing fast is the most fun for me,” Pate said. “I really like drawing live caricatures of people because their small movements allow me to add a little more personality into the drawing.” For UNM artists who are interested in drawing caricatures, Pate suggested for aspiring caricaturists to “people watch” and do a lot of live drawings of people in places such as coffee shops and other public settings.
In response to the state’s booming film industry, UNM’s digital film program gives students the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of “New Mexican Hollywood.” Six film and television projects are in production in the state, including “The Lone Ranger,” starring Johnny Depp and the television series “In Plain Sight,” according to The New Mexico Film Office. Through the University’s Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media Program, students can intern with companies including Sony Pictures Imageworks and Albuquerque Studios. Miguel Gandert, the director of the program, said one IFDM student is working on the Men in Black 3 film as part of an internship with Sony, while others work with the City of Albuquerque and the University to create digital film projects. “Anybody who’s making film using new media here, we’re willing to partner with them,” he said. But despite a growing number of film projects in New Mexico, Gandert, said UNM’s digital film program will not be developing into its own department any time soon. “I have no interest in becoming a department,” he said. “It would just make my mission much more complicated. When you’re an interdisciplinary program, it enables you to (be flexible), I like to
think of it as taking the best from each of my partners.” The program partners with the College of Fine Arts, College of Arts and Sciences, Anderson School of Management and the School of Engineering to create a specialized major for students who want to work in digital film. Since 2009, students have had the opportunity to get a degree in the field. Gandert said the fouryear program focuses on aspects of film such as gaming, animation and business. In 2004, then-Gov. Bill Richardson created the New Mexico Media Industries Strategy Plan in an effort to make the state an innovative leader in media arts and sciences. As part of the project, UNM was awarded a $3 million grant to create the Art, Research, Technology and Sciences (ARTS) Laboratory. The IFDM program is built upon the ARTS Lab. Students can apply to the program as freshmen, but Gandert said the program is competitive, and applying doesn’t always guarantee a spot. He said there are about 130 students in the program and another 70 will be accepted in the fall. IFDM student Eric Geusz, who was accepted into the program as a freshman, is a computer science major. Now a senior, he said he can’t decide if he wants to pursue video game design, visual effects or
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US ranks 5th highest for number of executions NEW YORK — The United States was the only Western democracy that executed prisoners last year, even as an increasing number of U.S. states are moving to abolish the death penalty, Amnesty International announced Monday. America’s 43 executions in 2011 ranked it fifth in the world in capital punishment, the rights group said in its annual review of worldwide death penalty trends. U.S. executions were down from 46 a year earlier. “If you look at the company we’re in globally, it’s not the company we want to be in: China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq,” Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Amnesty International USA, told The Associated Press. The United States seems deeply divided on the issue. Texas Gov. Rick Perry was cheered at a Republican presidential candidates’ debate last September when he defended his signature on 234 execution warrants over more than 10 years as being the “ultimate justice.” Just weeks later, young people rallied in person and online to protest the execution of Troy Davis in
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testing, which has exposed some mistaken convictions. With stronger defense tactics and appeals processes getting longer, U.S. states also found it more and more expensive to pursue death penalty cases, he said. The United States was the only member of the G-8 group of developed nations to use the death penalty last year. Japan, which also retains capital punishment, recorded no executions for the first time in 19 years, Amnesty reported. “Our government has made a very strong point of trying to reassert its position as a standard-bearer on human rights globally,” Nossel said. “When other countries look at the United States, the use of the death penalty really stands out a lot in the mind of Europeans and others around the world. We’re in such incongruous company.” Mexico strongly protested the July execution in the U.S. of one of its citizens, Humberto Leal, for rape and murder on the grounds that he had not been advised of his rights to receive legal advice and assistance from his consulate. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations is supposed to guarantee the right of any citizen to consular help.
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Georgia for the 1991 murder of a police officer. In the intervening years, key witnesses for the prosecution had recanted or changed their stories. “I think the debate on the issue may be nearing a tipping point in this country,” Nossel said. “I think we’re seeing momentum at the state level, in the direction of waning support for the death penalty.” Illinois banned the death penalty last year, and Oregon adopted a moratorium on executions. Maryland and Connecticut are close to banning executions, Amnesty said. And more than 800,000 Californians signed petitions to put a referendum on the state ballot in November that would abolish the death penalty. However, 34 U.S. states have the death penalty. Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks U.S. trends, told the AP that last year 78 prisoners received death sentences, down from an average of more than 300 annually a few years ago. “Executions peaked in 1999 at 98,” he added. “By all measures, the death penalty is on the defensive.” Dieter attributed much of the decline to the introduction of DNA
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Stephen Morton / AP Photo Protesters chant anti-death penalty slogans at a rally for Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis in Jackson, Ga. Sept. 21, 2011. Davis was executed last year for the 1991 murder of a police officer. Leal was one of 51 Mexican men who have been sentenced to death in the United States after being denied consular assistance, Amnesty said. The International Court of Justice had ordered a full review of all these cases after Texas executed another Mexican man in 2008. The U.S. federal stance on capital punishment was complicated by the
Defense Department’s announcement that it would seek the death penalty for six foreign nationals detained at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for trial by military commission. Amnesty contends that military commissions are discriminatory because they do not give foreign citizens the same right to appeal as U.S. courts.
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