Newswise — Ned Eckhardt leaned in and watched silently as his student, Jon Waller, maneuvered a state-of-the-art, $20,000 television camera just so.
It was painstaking, demanding work for Waller and his crew, who fiddled alternately with the camera, light filters and a broken, full-length mirror they were using to set up an unusual head-and-shoulders interview shot.
The interview subject? A former drug addict who runs a crystal methamphetamine task force. The man will serve as an important source for a 30-minute documentary on crystal meth addiction.
Students aren't using white light for any of the filming, choosing instead to use multi-colored light filters that bounce images off the broken mirror, creating an effect that's unusual"¦and unsettling.
"It's very creative--and very scary," says Eckhardt, clearly pleased. "Lighting is the most overlooked part of video production."
Chair of Rowan University's radio/television/film (RTF) department and himself an award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, Eckhardt founded and has taught the University's senior capstone Television Documentary Filmmaking course for 15 years.
In focusing on crystal meth addiction, Waller and his crew are continuing a long tradition in Eckhardt's course of focusing on socially relevant topics.
Through partnerships with the University, Rowan's Center for Addiction Studies, and outside groups, forged by Eckhardt, those documentaries are being seen—and distributed--nationwide.
Aimed at college and high school students, documentaries in past years have included: Wasted Youth (about binge drinking), Breaking the Silence (sexual abuse), Dancing With Darkness (ecstasy and party drug abuse), Hamster Cocktails and the Truth About Hazing (hazing) and Heroin: A Dose of Reality (heroin addiction).
Heroin, which was produced last year and has garnered four national awards and counting, is being distributed to all 54 New Jersey colleges and hundreds of high schools in the state by Rowan's Center for Addiction Studies. The center provided a $12,000 grant to the crystal meth crew to help fund their production.
Hamster Cocktails has been distributed nationally to schools, law enforcement and military agencies through Security on Campus, a leading advocate for safety on campuses. Additionally, the Navy purchased 700 copies to distribute nationally to high school ROTC programs.
"College-age production students can create documentaries that express profound concern for the human condition and can make a difference in the lives of others," Eckhardt said. "Each year, our students take on the biggest problems in the United States and come through with a meaningful project that has a productive life after the class is over."
An award-winning life, too.
Since 1990, the 35 documentaries produced in Eckhardt's classes have won more than 50 national awards, including a student Emmy, four CINE Golden Eagles, two Dore Schary awards, two Gracie Awards from the American Women in Radio and Television, first-place awards from the College Broadcaster's Inc. (CBI), National Broadcasting Society (NBS), New Jersey Young Film and Videomakers awards and many Crystal Awards of Excellence from the Communicator Awards.
"In the college setting, it's sometimes hard for students to take risks," Eckhardt said. "They're worried about grades and other things.
"But student documentary crews have real power," he continued. "Because they're students and they don't come in with agendas, they can go places where standard media can't go. This course enables young people to have a voice, through their documentaries."
While topics of social concern are often the focus of documentaries in the course, students delve into other, interesting and sometimes offbeat subjects as well.
Just down the hall from the studio where Waller and his crew are setting up the crystal meth interview, Eckhardt is in a Bozorth Hall editing room as senior Andrea Witting and her crew screen footage from a shoot in New York City.
Their documentary focuses on punk rockers over 40. The crew is interspersing rare archival footage of punk bands shot years ago with interviews with genetic scientists, business people and telecommunications engineers who still manage to maintain their punk-ness.
"Punk isn't just about fashion," said Witting, whose crew members passed up early graduation and resume-boosting internships and jobs specifically to take Eckhardt's course and produce the documentary, which they hope to turn into a feature-length film.
"We want to make people aware that punkers are real people. They have real jobs. And they're not bad people."
Across Rowan's campus, in a band practice room in Wilson Hall, the third crew in Eckhardt's class is on location, filming a documentary on musicians who use unconventional instruments—French horns, marimbas, bassoons--to play jazz.
"We want to give a general audience, whether they like jazz and know about it or not, an unexpected jazz experience," producer Samantha Cresson said. "We want to shake up people's preconceived notions of jazz.
"We're going to capture the youthful, fun edge of the group and what they're trying to do. Each musician pays their chosen instrument, which is like an extension of themselves, in blended-genre arrangements that give the group a fresh sound."
On Wednesday, May 10, in what is the culmination of four years of rigorous study, all of Eckhardt's students will premiere their films to an audience of Rowan students, staff and alumni at 7 p.m. in the University's Bozorth auditorium. The subjects of their documentaries are invited as well.
"It's a great time," said Eckhardt, noting that 90 percent of the alumni from the documentary class currently work in the television, film and media production industry, including for MSNBC, National Geographic, MTV and NFL Films.
"All of the equipment our students use is what they encounter in the real world, including Avid editing, which is the industry standard. They learn very quickly that the AC cord is as important as the $20,000 camera.
"I teach them production techniques. But the structuring, the designing"¦that's all theirs," Eckhardt added. "I just back off and let them be creative."
RSS