20 20 A N N UA L R E P O RT
NOW SH ‘The Co OWING: mp
uter Sci-Fi Film S Communit eries is a y Collabor ation By Kathy S
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Kylie Jacks, ’19, star of Episode 3, sits down to read the messages written on rocks in the memory jar from her mother’s funeral. Some rocks have a mysterious message.
Professor Emeritus Arthur Rennels retired this summer as chair of the School of Communication, History and Interdisciplinary Studies after 20 years at UCM. As part of his legacy, he leaves behind a project that grew from a seed he planted to give students the opportunity to create a film series. Students applied for the “Producing a Web Series” special topics project in spring of 2018, indicating which crew positions interested them, and production started that fall.
Actor and UCM instructor Aaron Scully races through an underground corridor on campus as professor Mark von Schlemmer directs. One Theatre major and two Music Technology students enrolled; the rest were part of UCM’s Digital Media Production (DMP) program, where associate professors Mark von Schlemmer and Michael Graves collaborated to develop the concept for “The Computer Lab.” “Mark and I were both interested in sci-fi,” Graves says, hesitating to confine “The Computer Lab” to a genre while drawing parallels 12
Fall 2020 | ucmfoundation.org/magazine
to shows like “Stranger Things,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Black Mirror.” “There’s an old adage: there’s the film you write, the film you shoot and the film you edit. We had the great fortune to work with amazingly talented student and faculty collaborators, who helped shape the world, characters and tone of ‘The Computer Lab’ into the version you see today.” A 2020 Opportunity Grant from the UCM Alumni Foundation funded a Mac Pro, a powerful computer that can handle editing video shot in 4K, the industry standard. This and other Opportunity Grants are made possible by private contributions to the university’s unrestricted Central Annual Fund. “The students got experience working extensively with 4K footage … and realized that takes twice as long to copy,” says von Schlemmer, who taught “Producing a Web Series” and applied for the grant. “The night doesn’t end when you say cut; it ends when you get the terabytes of footage we just shot moved over to hard drives and backed up.” Although the crew was primarily from the DMP program, the project involved talent from many disciplines at the university. Students, faculty and alumni were cast in lead roles, and students in Graves’ film appreciation class played “extras” in the four-part series. Graves, who wrote the screenplays based on stories that he and von Schlemmer conceptualized, says the storyline across episodes is loosely based on Plato’s allegory of the cave. Being colorblind, Graves knows he sees things differently than the majority of people and has always been intrigued with the distinction between reality and perception. He made George Berkley’s “to be is to be perceived” a recurring phrase throughout the series. Theatre and Dance instructor Aaron Scully, ’12 and ’14, stars as a troubled professor who is very much still “in the dark” in Episode 1, titled “Escape Velocity.” The office in the Martin Building that became the “computer lab” was designed to be cavelike with one bare light bulb hanging over the computer that the lead characters in all four episodes happened upon. To make the set look neglected and
