HANNA CHU
Assistant A&E Editor
Photo courtesy Anela Holck/ Assistant Photo Editor
With Hollywood just a short drive away, many Pepperdine students have dreams of breaking into the entertainment industry to become the next Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino.
“I like beautiful work,” said junior Clint Loveness, a telecommunications major. “I love the epic movies that Steven Spielberg has made. My passion is for the photography aspect, the cinematography. It’s beautiful.”
Loveness began pursuing his dream of making movies in the fourth grade with his father’s old home-video camera.
“I started using my toys, and I also did animations,” Loveness said. “I had drawn thousands of pictures.”
Loveness is still actively pursuing his dream of being a filmmaker through his production company, C. L. Productions. Over the summer, one of the digital videos he created was shown at a local theater in his hometown of Redding, Calif.
“I convinced Domino’s pizza to give us free pizza for the event,” he said. “We had it promoted through the radio and the newspaper, and I made a little movie trailer that played the week before on commercials.”
On campus, Loveness has two jobs: making youth group videos for Campus Ministries and making promotional videos for the university. Loveness created a Facebook group also called “C.L. Productions,” so he can contact other filmmakers when in need of help on a project.
Sandra Smith, a sophomore television production and international communications major, also hopes to break into the movie industry. But Smith is taking a more international approach to filmmaking — she said she hopes to work professionally in South Korea.
When Smith took a video field production class her freshman year, she completed a project designed to uncover exactly what she wanted to do with her major. During this project, she said she realized the genre that she watched and enjoyed the most was Korean drama.
“I looked into it, and I was really interested,” Smith said. “And I always wanted to live overseas.”
Although she doesn’t speak Korean fluently, she said she is optimistic about her chances of making it in the Korean film industry after having studied there this past summer at the Korean University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea.
“I took a Korean cinema class there, and my professor was in the Korean industry, so I’m hoping to milk that,” Smith said.
She would like to start with a romantic drama based on her parents’ love story.
“My mother worked as a waitress in a mess hall in Korea, and my dad was just a soldier,” she said. “They did not even speak the same language, and it was during the 1970s when it was really uncommon.”
While Smith said she dreams of working in foreign films, senior television productions major Shawn Wilkerson has another goal for his filmmaking future.
He said he wants to create another genre: dramedy.
“You’re putting serious dramatic situations (in the movie) and the overall theme is drama, but there’s parts you laugh at and you’re like, ‘Was I supposed to laugh at that?’” Wilkerson said of his preferred genre.
He said he challenges himself to be original without having to “push the envelope or show the most skin.”
Wilkerson is not alone in his thirst for originality. Many student filmmakers said they feel the pressure to stand apart from the rest of the pack due to the growing number of students also pursuing careers in the film industry.
“You just meet so many people who are trying to get into Hollywood and moving to California, your chances are so shaky,” said junior telecommunications major Lissette Jean-Marie. “I know a lot of people make horror films as their first movies, but I don’t know if I’d be able to do it in a way that no one has done before.”
In a career frequently described as a competitive bottleneck, student filmmakers said they are doing all they can to gain experience now.
Jean-Marie and Smith are working on a television show for Newswaves called “Assumed Reality.”
Wilkerson is taking advantage of the opportunities that the athletics department offers to practice his skills in creating videos and editing.
“Right now, I’m interning with the soccer team and soon to be with the women’s basketball team,” Wilkerson said. “I’ve been doing a lot of video for them.”
The downside to this, Wilkerson said, is that he is busy working for other people and his own creative projects have to be postponed.
“Basically, I’ve started saving scripts that I’ve been writing so that when I invest in a better camera and have more time outside of school, I can make them instead of rushing later,” Wilkerson said.
Student filmmakers also worry about surviving the brutal realities of the entertainment industry after college.
“I’m going to be going from job to job wondering where the next paycheck will be coming from,” Jean-Marie said. “It’s such an unstable future, but I don’t know what else I’d want to do.”
While many student filmmakers feel anxiety about going into such a cutthroat industry, they also said they can’t imagine pursuing another career.
“Filmmaking is like a puzzle, and you have to figure out how to put it together,” Loveness said. “That’s always been fun. I love being able to create something and having the audience watch.”
09-15-2005
