Film educators discuss pandemic challenges, surprises

New Mexico film industry educators highlighted both the challenges and the pleasant surprises of educating film students during a pandemic in the past year during the Virtual Film & TV Day on Monday.

Film educators from several higher education institutes around New Mexico were present for the virtual event, which was sponsored by IATSE Local 480, the New Mexico Film Industry, and the New Mexico Film Office.

“It was challenging, but I think we made lemonade by learning new ways of creating what we needed to create,” New Mexico State University film educator Rajeev Nirmalakhandan said. “I think it pushed them (students) to be even more creative, because they couldn’t just go out and shoot. They had to figure out really smart ways of getting the footage and then their collaboration skills had to be really fine tuned.”

He said instead of sitting in front of a computer together or in a group meeting, students were working on Zoom and sending footage back and forth to one another and talking to people they had never met before.

“I would say we sort of made limeade out of our situation,” Milton Riess, a film educator from Santa Fe Community College, said with a laugh.

“It caught us off guard. We did our best. We succeeded better than what I think we thought we would,” he said.

Riess said it was “virtually impossible” to convert some film classes to online, so some classes were canceled altogether last year, such as advanced lighting.

“It was a challenge to teach advanced lighting or advanced grip when you can’t actually put your hands on to the gear,” he said.

Anthony Deiter of the Institute of American Indian Arts said it has been interesting the past year to see how “adaptability emerged” in regard to film educational programs.

“At first, it caught us a little bit flat-footed with having to adjust on the fly, but we started to find we already had the parts to put emphasis on online learning anyway,” he said.

Deiter said the biggest challenge for the IAIA film program was how to take programs that are more traditional and based in the classroom and move them online. He said his department faced challenges in that some of their students from tribal communities lived remotely and were unable to have high-speed Internet.

“We had to adjust the learning for them,” he said. “I think in the end, we just had a really good team on board, and basically, they started to embrace new technologies pretty fast and found out surprisingly that they worked very well for a lot of our community. So, we’ve had some pleasant surprises.”

All of the New Mexico educators agreed that positive did come in the midst of the challenges they faced in the past year in regard to teaching virtually. One such positive was opportunities that were created for students.

Luke Renner of San Juan Community College said he and his students collaborated with an educator back east to create virtual field trips to New Mexico for first through third graders in Virginia, Alabama, New York, and Oklahoma, as a means of “sharing the culture and some of the things we have to offer.”

“The one thing I’d like to say that’s hopeful that came out of this, which was actually an enormous revelation, was that professionals who would often come to visit us anyway seemed to be doubly more interested and enthusiastic about stepping up to come into class on Zoom,” said James Stone of the University of New Mexico. “So, we’ve had so many meetings with film professionals, who wanted to come in and give us their time just to give back. We’ve brought students into contact with so many wonderful mentors in the producing, directing, cinematic, graphic world, which perhaps we wouldn’t have done if COVID hadn’t hit.”

Nirmalakhandan echoed the statement by saying he has been teaching a new course called Artists Behind the Scenes in which he has been able to provide a different guest speaker for each class.

“I think it’s not only that they’re more available (people in the film industry),” he said. “I think as a culture, we’ve now come to this understanding that this sort of communication is very doable and feasible and convenient. So, this is something we’ve learned from this past year that we could take on into the future. So, this class may not have happened, or I may not have even thought about it if it wasn’t for what happened last year.”

All of the educators said their programs are at least partially in person once again, and they feel the New Mexico film industry and film industry education futures are bright, and talks of collaborations between community colleges and universities for transferring film education credits have begun to stir.

“I love the fact that New Mexico film education is a big house; there’s room for all of us in there, and I think we all work together very well,” Jon Barr of Eastern New Mexico University said in closing.