Guest Post from Hilbert College: Student Auteurs Put Cart Before the Horse
Hilbert College is a small liberal arts college located south of Buffalo, New York. It’s Communication Studies program was started in 2004 with the intention of providing students entering the communications field with extensive hands-on experience without having to give up the advantages of a traditional rigorous liberal arts education.
Students in the program in these two short years have produced documentaries on rebuilding efforts and hurricane relief in the Bahamas (in coordination with Students in Free Enterprise), on cancer survivors, the wine industry of Western New York, the Erie Canal, Letchworth State Park, the Zoar Valley, and have a wide range of projects in pre-production, including a claymation short, a zombie movie, a documentary on small bands in New York’s music scene, and commercials for local volunteer fire fighting, the Motion Picture Association of America (in coordination with Students in Free Enterprise), a local car dealership, and of course, Firefox, all of which are intended for actual air.
This productivity comes from the small size of the department (currently 25 undergraduates), 24/7 access to equipment including 24p digital cameras, complete nonlinear editors, a steadicam, and a complete suite of professional lighting and sound equipment. Next year the department will be adding another faculty member, high definition video cameras and added high definition editing suites, and will be moving into a new, student designed production center custom built from student drawn plans to meet the needs of the department.
The students who worked on the Firefox project wrote, produced, directed, edited, and now have prepared for release of the project with a very limited budget and a lot of sweat equity. The students choose from the beginning to base their commercial on the concept of Jungian archetypes as a sales tool to communicate messages underneath the main voice over, then explored the client supplied documents looking for ideas that would express the real meaning of the Firefox browser.
The archetype chosen was that of a galloping horse (in this case pulling a cart) implying power, majesty, and obedience. It also suggested the final tag line of ‘why put the cart before the horse.’ The students then developed a color palette by analyzing the Firefox logo and pulling a primary blue from the graphic, which then became the tint chosen to back the horse. It was decided to shoot the horse against snow, but this almost had to be abandoned when there was a lack of snow fall around the shoot days; a sudden short snow combined with a practice session for the horses allowed the shoot to come off after all. At the same time a simple audio track was developed from open source elements using Apple’s Soundtrack Pro. The final production was editing during a marathon session, and was produced in the higher quality DV50 (DVCPro50) digital format, because the amount of color heavy special effects, though simple, presented a possible problem with noise in the broad expanses of primary colors if the DV25 shooting format was used. After the initial edit, a post-mortem was held, and the audio was remixed to better hear certain parts of the session. Three versions were eventually produced, and one version was chosen to be reedited in DV25 and to have a DVCPro100 1080i60 version cut.
During the students self-analysis they identified areas they needed to improve upon in their production, including better handling of the audio, improving their storyboarding, and better contingency plans. The students, all volunteers (none received college credit for this assignment, something that is not unusual since students routinely use the equipment for their own projects) wished they could have done a series of commercials rather than just one, that they had a chance to meet with the client over client needs, and that they had access to exemplars of previous Firefox commercials.
Read more on the Hilbert College production diary page.
