I believe that cinema is going to be around for bloody ever
No matter how isolating our technology has become there will always be those who seek out
connection with others through an art form, and we're it.
Cinema since its inception has been a cultural bonfire.
So when you come see a movie you are sitting with a bunch of people, and the experience becomes more visceral and real.
Cinema encompasses many art forms and many disciplines. It is involved in English, graphics, arts, photography.
All of these things are part of what happens on that screen.
So this is not just sitting there watching pretty pictures. This is actually an encompassing discipline.
At 18 years old. My first job was at a drive-in movie theater, and that did it.
So here I am.
There are some students: they arrive at OSU, they know what they want to do, they do their four or five years, and they're out.
But there plenty of students who come here, and they kind of don't know what they want to do, and they're discovering
right then and there, right in your classroom, what their next move is gonna be.
You never know as a professor whether something you say to someone will set something off.
I'm John Lewis. I am the Distinguished Professor of Film Studies
in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film.
I've been teaching Film and Cultural Studies since 1983 here at OSU.
I think when they see that wow, it's not just I'm just going to the movies, and I'm getting three credits or four credits.
It is, wow, there are things to talk about here that maybe touch upon
the humanities, aspects of literary culture, aspects of artistic culture,
but also there are things to talk about here that affect my real life.
I think, what's important to me is that students are able to
critically engage with film and
not see film as just a source of entertainment or leisure object, but
to also engage with
how to analyze a film, how to have a sort of a critical distanciation from film, so that they're not just
seduced by all the things that make film so easy and wonderful to consume, but also
to think about it as a product as a socio-cultural, political
product of a given time or place.
One of the things we talk a lot about when we talk about study in any narrative form is the value of empathy.
When you read book, or watch a film, or engage with any kind of long-form narrative that
involves a life quite different from your own,
the ability to
think one's way or even view one's way
into the experience of another person is
essential training in empathy.
If one reflects on how we construct our relationship with the world,
we're always telling ourselves stories, or we're imagining the stories of others, or we're
historicizing the places we are.
It's a way of looking at a kind of aspect of popular culture that students are already
participating in. They're already going to movies thinking, about movies, talking about movies.
It's almost about
deepening a kind of critical mode with which to engage with any kind of visual culture.
So in teaching students to see narrative critically, we're teaching them to be
critical consumers of a world that is defined
omnipresently, in story or narrative terms.
So one of the things that's exciting to me when I think about how OSU alums have impacted the film industry,
it's that they've come to the film industry from so many different OSU paths.,
whether it's engineering, or business, or art.
One can think of Harley Jessup, a production designer of Pixar, working on such films as
Coco, Ratatouille, Monsters Incorporated.
Something at Pixar they really value -- there's a childlike quality to the place.
The offices are lined with toys.
At the same time, it's really hard work, and there's a very serious aspect of filmmaking that we're involved in, but
everybody's keeping pretty in touch with their childhood.
I think that's part of the success of the place.
It's this mixture of
grown-up, sophisticated ideas with ideas that are coming straight out of your childhood fantasies.
I like the variety. I like almost being miscast on something, something that I know nothing about
Formula One racing in Cars 2 -- I knew nothing about that.
French cooking for Ratatouille -- I knew nothing about French cooking or French restaurants or all that world.
It's just exciting to get to learn about a new kind of world.
A key bit of advice that I would give young aspiring writers is do not race to begin to write your story.
Find your story.
Live in your story.
You'll know when it's time to type those words: "fade in."
My name is Mike Rich, and I write screenplays.
My break-in story was definitely the path less traveled.
You know, it's it's generally seen as a young person's game, and you have to be in LA.
But I was living up here in Oregon.
I was working at the Kink FM radio station.
But I always had this interest in writing, and it dates back to my high school days.
I didn't write Finding Forester with the
expectation of changing my life and starting a new career.
It was just a creative outlet that I wanted to pursue.
I entered it in this competition called the Nickel Fellowship specifically set up for writers who'd never sold a screenplay.
Did that in 1998.
There were 4,600 scripts that were entered that year,
and I was fortunate enough to have another five fellowship winning scripts.
It was quite a ride after that.
My routine's been the same ever since Finding Forrester.
I get up, pour my first of 16 cups of coffee of the day, and just sit in for about a four hour stretch.
Any given day writing is a different experience.
There are days where I will stare at that cursor and
realize it's not happening on that particular day. And when that happens I get the yellow legal pad out.
I just start moving. I start walking. I stand.
I'm a fan of the big walk.
I love to get out, and I will walk for 3 to 4 miles, and that's writing. That's part of the writing process.
The journey of writing is realizing that an epiphany can happen at any moment.
It's almost an emotional experience when it does happen because you realize ok, the story's engaged again,
the story is going off on a path that I'm excited about.
The folks that I've worked with, the directors that I've worked with, whether it be Gus Van Sant whether it's John Lee Hancock,
they all come from different backgrounds, too. That's one thing that a lot of people don't realize.
Not everybody who's in the film industry went to film school.
My journey is very untraditional. I spent 35 years as an engineer and a business executive an oil business
and entered the filmmaking business only seven years ago.
But, basically, I took my business acumen into the filmmaking business to help startup an
independent film company.
I'll tell you the transformative effort to go from being a business executive in the oil business to the film business
actually wasn't a big leap because it's a business and I just applied my business skills to a different industry called the filmmaking industry.
But at the same time along that way gained the creative skills.
It's not about just capturing the image. It's about how to construct a powerful compelling story.
At the end of the day,
Hollywood is about telling a story, and if you don't have a very good story to tell, it doesn't matter all your fancy equipment,
all your lives are propped. It doesn't matter. You won't engage an audience.
A school like Oregon State can really leverage its technical prowess and marry that up with the
liberal arts -- the creative side, the storytelling.
So, my name is Katherine Dykstra, I'm a DCA major.
My job here at Orange Media is producer of Locals Live.
When I started at OSU,
I was actually pre-med. I took chemistry for a couple terms and decided that wasn't my thing and then kind of bounced around liberal arts
until I landed in DCA, and I kind of just fell in love with it.
My biggest role here as the producer is to kind of organize everyone.
I fill holes where they need to be filled on the crew,
but, really, I just stand back and plan the show and let it run as best as possible.
Mostly what I do is booking artists, communicating with my crew, my team, and planning the set, planning the production itself.
Then when crew call comes at 4:00 p.m., I stand back and I let them run things.
Think it'd be so cool if I were directing, or doing like cinematography, or producing anything that has to do with music.
That's kind of been my goal since I entered NMC is to combine music and the visual aspect of it.
My name is Jason Dobler. I am a Fine Arts Illustration major, and I'm a sophomore.
I would love to do animation or just illustration for comics.
Harley Jessup is going to be the commencement speaker.
Just the films that he's worked on like
Monsters, Inc. and Ratatouille,
he's impacted culture so much
from when I was growing up, too. You know, I can't even imagine
what my life would be like without the movies that he's helped out on.
You can't be stuck to one style because then you're just really setting yourself in to one mindset.
But if you're exploring different mediums, and different ways of doing things, and different ways of thinking about things,
different perspectives, then it's really
an introspective exploration of yourself.
Being a visual person and really kind of putting your own mind on display to really form and shape culture,
I think that's a really important thing, and I think that's something I aspire to be one day.
My name is Polly Lisa Czech, and I'm a Digital Communication Arts major in the College of Liberal Arts.
I started off at Oregon State in exploratory studies, and I got involved right away with the college of business and entrepreneurship program.
Through that involvement
I had a lot of travel opportunities and the first trip I went on we went to Uganda and it was with the social
entrepreneurship group Enactus.
The video production team came with us on that trip, and they were documenting the student experience, and that's where I really saw the
extent of which the storytelling could go to.
That really opened up my eyes to a lot of opportunities. I wasn't even considering that when I went on this trip.
I was like, yeah, you know, I want to do international business. I know I want to travel.
I know that I want to be involved in non-profit work.
That trip essentially changed my life because it completely changed my trajectory.
I really want to explore further documentary storytelling and if that's a video
journalism route and career than, you know, maybe those are my first steps after graduation.
What appeals to me about storytelling is everybody has a story to tell.
It's it's something that is across every culture. There's always storytellers.
Think there are
increasingly more opportunities for
particularly underrepresented groups to break into the film industry.
This is an age of diversity.
The beauty of the vast mediums we have in front of us allow a lot of voices to be heard now.
So let those voices be heard. There's gonna be platforms now available for people to have that unique voice.
Because, guess what, there are unique audiences and demands out there and now the ability to easily
distribute, through the internet, to worldwide audiences at your fingertips.
When I started we had a handful of studios, and that was it.
Now we have Amazon and Netflix, who this past year both spent more money on creative product than any of the major studios.
And it's gonna change. I mean we've we've seen the exponential change that has happened in just the last three years.
Can you imagine what's gonna happen in the next five years?
We might be 3D live stream from the Opera in
Paris, but it's still gonna be where people come.
There are very few majors at Oregon State that cannot benefit through the value of story.
I believe that it would give a student an advantage that no matter what they get into
there are threads that run through almost everything else.
I'm still doing the same thing I was doing when I finished college.
I sincerely feel like my experience at OSU was very formative.
I've been doing this for a very long time, and I feel very fortunate that I've been doing this because it is perhaps the most
self-actualizing thing I have ever done because it takes so many of my skills. It's what education is all about
you know that we're not about just creating so these ultra specialized people we're interested in helping create a
kind of thinking democracy.
Whether you come from an engineering, science, or liberal arts background, we each have powerful stories to share with the world.