So You Want to Make a Movie?

THE YARD WAS QUIET over spring break, probably the quietest it has been since September. Most undergraduates fled campus for sunny Jamaica or extravagant trips to Europe. But not all was quiet in the Yard during the last week of March. Within the depths of Sever Hall, with its long, dark corridor and tiny, closet-sized editing rooms, there was constant activity. Four senior VES concentrators spent their spring vacations splicing together clips of footage in order to complete their senior film theses. Ironically, outside of one of the small, windowless editing rooms, a sign is posted which reads, "Students should not live in editing rooms."

This is the scene of one of the lesser known dens of scholastic activity for undergraduates. It is in the basement of Sever Hall that the short films, video documentaries, film theses and animated films that will be shown this weekend at the Carpenter Center have come into being. It is also in the basement of Sever Hall that the creators of these films have essentially lived for the past few months. "It's funny," says VES 53b student Carrick M. Moore-Gerety '98, "You can go down into the basement of Sever almost anytime and there are always tons of students sleeping in the hallway or just fried from all the hours of sound mixes and editing." Moore-Gerety has been working on his three-and-a-half-minute animated film, which he describes as "collage or cut-out animation," for the past few months down in Sever.

Mimi N. Schultz '95 is a VES 50 (Introduction to Filmmaking) student who has had her own experience of cooperative learning through her work for the class. Schultz is one of 10 students in her section who are putting forth a collaborative effort in order to produce a documentary on a factory near Kendall Square where blind people are employed. "It becomes a completely communal effort," says Schultz. "It's very demanding of Harvard students, who are usually so self motivated, to come-up with a semesterlong project that we all can agree upon." The students in the class have to screen and approve any changes or editing done to their film as a group.

Even students who are making films on their own view their filmmaking processes as collaborative. Erin E. Holsinger '98 is a VES 51 student who has taken two trips to Washington, D.C., shot 13hours worth of footage and edited her footage down to a 10-minute film on "teenage self-discovery through the eyes of four American kids." Holsinger is thankful for her fellow classmates' help in her project: "You want to see how your piece reads with your audience. Throughout the editing process, you need to keep showing it to other people. In that way, you really do lean on your classmates."

For the four senior theses filmmakers, the community in the basement of Sever was extremely important. "Filmmaking and editing gets so intense and personal that you really need other people's help," says Amanda R. Micheli '95. Micheli took a year off in order to shoot her film called "Just for the Ride," a personal and historical documentary on rodeo cowgirls in New Mexico. She has spent the entire year in the basement of Sever editing her 11 hours of footage into the 58-minute final project. "Most professional filmmakers spend four or five years editing their films, but in an undergraduate setting you don't have that time," says Micheli. "People don't realize how much labor goes into the editing. I would definitely say that the kind of community feeling that developed down here over the year made such a difference in how painful the whole editing process was."

The presentation of student films this weekend is the end result of this editing frenzy. While most student filmmakers will look back on their films as well-worth the time and on their long nights in Sever with a kind of nostalgia, a week ago their outlook on the whole experience was radically different. As Holsinger commented, "You know that sign about students not living in editing rooms, I used to think that sign was funny. But after the days that I did live in them, it doesn't seem quite that hilarious."