PEOPLE
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Still from ‘Night at the Museum’ courtesy of 20th Century Fox
film shoots like “Batman” and “Backdraft.” “I would often stop to stand and watch [the filming] because I thought filmmaking only had a creative part,” he says. “But I would see electricians, mechanical engineers – there were all these people from the technology aspect really having a huge bearing on the eventual product. I thought, ‘I’m a mechanical engineer and I’m always interested in art and storytelling. How do I make those things come together?’” In his spare time, Aikat started taking a correspondence class Cartoonerama (yes, through snail-mail) with the late professor Leo Stoutsenberger in Maine. After that, he earned his MFA in Film, Video, and Computer Animation from USC’s film school. “The rest is history – I can’t get out of it now, it’s a trap!” He says with a laugh.
For Lewak, her interest in graphic storytelling started much earlier. She admits she was a secret comic book fan as a kid and often knows more details about the comic book characters depicted in the films Aikat works on. “Comic books like “Fantastic Four,” “Avengers,” “X-Men” – that was my childhood!” Lewak says. “I had a brother who had all the comics so that’s how I found them. They had these great girl heroes.” As a child, Lewak longed to see her female heroes in movies. “They didn’t exist or couldn’t be made unless they were 2D cartoons.” Her love for these comic book heroes inspired her to include graphic fiction in her classes, which is just one step away from animation. Both Aikat and Lewak hope to expand JHI’s global educational model beyond universities and film studios. “Part of our long-term goal is to work with kindergarten through grade 12,” says Lewak. Aikat agrees, “We hope to partner with an agency like the Khan Academy and give away [the lessons] for free, to have an entire sequence of tracks, get a MacArthur grant and teach people programming and computer graphics at the same time.” For more info on the John Hughes Institute, visit jhughesinstitute.org.
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