DePaul University’s year-old Digital Cinema Program leaps into the big leagues this summer when a mix of professionals and students from the program will produce a feature film under the school’s Bluelight Productions banner.
Director Matt Irvine brings together the same core team of industry professional faculty members who have overseen the production of Bluelight’s inaugural hour-long “Last Call,” which is in post after shooting last July.
Gary Novak is adapting the untitled feature script from Irvine’s unproduced play “Scott’s Dead,” about three brothers uncovering the dark past of their recently deceased oldest brother.
Production will run for an expected six weeks beginning in late May, with DP Scott Erlinder and producer JoAnne Zielinski. Professional department heads and approximately 20 students will fill out the crew. Cast will be pro actors working under the SAG experimental agreement.
Irvine aims Bluelight productions for the festival circuit with an eye toward exploiting the full range of commercial distribution prospects.
He said that on the feature “we’re doing a lot more preproduction and a more extensive casting call” than on “Last Call.”
Joe Rabig is cutting “Last Call” and will hand it off to sound editor David Stone (“Oceans 12”), who won an Oscar for “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Post is projected to wrap by spring.
A division of the School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems, Digital Cinema currently has 100 students majoring in the program.
Digital Cinema offers concentrations in cinema, animation, and videogame design. “We’re going to start working more with the videogame component of the program,” Irvine said. “We plan to have the game development people turn the film into a prototype for a videogame.”
Irvine said he also anticipated more involvement from the animation department, which has contributed some graphics and effects to “Last Call.”
He sees the Digital Cinema Program as a major break from the prevailing film school model. “There’s this attitude in Chicago that students have to settle for being technicians,” he said.
“We’re more about the complete filmmaker,” he said. “What if somebody told Scorcese in film school that he couldn’t make it? I look at my students and think, why couldn’t one of them be another Scorcese? I want a ton of students in the program who want to be moviemakers.
“That’s what’s going to change the industry here?more people making movies, and making them here.”
See www.cti.depaul.edu/digitalcinema.
– by Ed M. Koziarski, edk@homesickblues.com
