The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Arts Thursday, September 28, 2017 — 5B COURTESY OF FILMIC PRODUCTIONS Filmic Productions is a group on campus Filmic brings professional production to our campus The independent production company brings organization and diversity to create professional grade video for the university You’re sitting in the Big House, it’s graduation, and you are leaving your home of the last four years. And in the midst of all the tears and commencement addresses, a video plays — one filled with all of the things that made being a Wolverine over the past four years so special, one filled with the inside jokes that only students at the University share. Professionally done, and over five minutes long, this video, and many of the others you’ve seen throughout your time at the University, was made by Filmic Productions, Michigan’s premier student run video production group. Filmic is a group filled with a diversity of students, who range in ages, majors and passions. From Ross to Anthropology to Creative Writing, they all share ELI RALLO Daily Arts Writer FILM one passion — making and producing films. As a group, they consider themselves “cinematic problem solvers” and strive to make students, alumni and professors alike “feel something” from the videos they put out year after year. LSA senior Michael Boctor, Filmic’s lead director, was passionate about Filmic from the moment he was accepted to Michigan. “I opened up my acceptance letter to the University of Michigan, and there was this little video attached beneath the ‘CONGRATULATIONS— You’re IN!’,” he said. “I watched it and had chills running through my veins. The video made me more passionate than ever about becoming a Wolverine. It evoked excitement and emotion in me, and I could tell that the University must have had to hire some serious professionals to get that done. I wasn’t wrong. That video was Filmic Productions’s “The Letter M.” Behind the camera were a bunch of individuals with a combination of talent and passion that created a dominant force in the market they were in, and I couldn’t help but be drawn towards that.” The students who join Filmic do so because they have a passion for film and creating art that sends a message to a larger group. They are driven by the desire to create, but also by the larger desire to share stories. “Film is a reflection of our society, but film also helps define society,” said LSA senior Michelle Kim, Filmic’s producer. Filmic plays a big part in defining the society at the University. Between Bicentennial address videos, graduation videos, acceptance videos and countless others that have racked up thousands upon thousands of views, they are no doubt the head media group on campus. What’s even more important than the work they do, though, is the community they build doing it. They consider themselves a very tight-knit group — and more than just friends, they are family. They split meetings into general team meetings and project specific meetings to keep organized. “If it’s early in the production timeline, the producer will normally give the update and talk about about how to have conversations with the client and what we’re brainstorming,” Rachel Hurwitz, LSA senior and producer, said. “If it’s in the production stage, normally the director will talk about the shoots we have lined up, what is working and what’s not and how we are planning to move forward. Finally, if it’s in the post-production stage, the editor will discuss how it’s all coming together.” Though a lot of fun, the team of Filmic has a lot of weight on their shoulders as well. With the University enlisting them to work on projects for publicity and special events, there’s a lot of pressure to succeed. “Being so professional really puts on the pressure to perform,” LSA senior Leah Hirsh, another producer, said. “It makes a project more than just something you make for your own satisfaction. It’s an opportunity to really say something and have a voice to a larger population. So often as college students, our voices feel unimportant. These larger projects give Filmic, a group of college students, a powerful platform to tell stories.” Filmic prides themselves on their focus as a storytelling group. This makes their art more personal and more influential on the society of Ann Arbor, Michigan. “You’re taking something that never existed and forming something out of it, something that makes people feel different after,” said Kim. “It’s storytelling at its best.” By being such a large part of the University, Filmic reaches a diverse group of people — and it’s really important to the team that they continue to do so. In a world where people need to relate to and understand art, Filmic is more needed than ever. And the work that they have done, and will do going forward, is extremely important to telling the stories of every person who walks through the Diag, sits in the Big House and attends a lecture in Angell Hall. “We brand ourselves as creative problem solvers and I think that is really true,” Hurwitz said. “Being in Filmic has caused me to start looking at the world differently, not only in how to frame a shot, but how to interact with the people and the world around me and influence them in a positive light. It’s not just about how to make the video look professional, but how to make something people are going to feel connected to and want to watch again and again.” Behind the camera were a bunch of individuals with a combination of talent and passion that created a dominant force in the market they were in COMEDY CENTRAL What if we wrote a show about us just ‘hanging out’ you know? City of Aspiring Angels: How the ‘U’ competes in the LA screenwriting hellscape There’s an urban legend floating around the Screen Arts and Cultures department that two students in the program sold a spec-script to “Broad City.” Through my inconclusive investigations, I can neither confirm nor deny the validity of this story, so, for now, it’ll have to remain a myth. (But how cool would it be if it were true?) Regardless, it’s a tale that those with literary aspirations love to hear as they fire up a brand- spanking new document of Final Draft. After all, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote “Good Will Hunting” in college, so really anything is possible. If spending a summer in Los Angeles taught me one thing, it’s that the aspiring writer’s pipe dream is, ironically, a Hollywood cliché. At any given L.A. coffee shop, at least three laptops would be opened to an unfinished screenplay, with an over- caffeinated and under-groomed “creative” at the keyboard. Even Uber drivers, without fail, tried to sell me on their movie pitch as soon as they caught drift that I was in “the biz.” Little did they know I was a just a bushy-tailed intern. Even my “original” ideas were already taken. My roommate and I had been toying with the premise for a workplace TV comedy set in the mailroom of a Hollywood talent agency. Our story was coming together swimmingly: we’d thought of the characters, the love-triangles, the neurotic bosses. And, since Hollywood loves producing stories about Hollywood, we joked that this was our ticket to screenwriting success. That is, until I overheard some tipsy guy in Santa Monica trying to impress a thoroughly unimpressed girl with a plan to pitch his (identical) original series “The Mailroom” to a network executive later that week. In a market oversaturated with talent, how are aspiring writers able to differentiate themselves? The odds seem daunting at best, if not downright demoralizing. And yet, even in Los Angeles, a city over 2,000 miles away from Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan finds a way to take care of its own. It starts in the classroom. The Screen Arts and Cultures department, lovingly abbreviated to SAC (rumors are circulating of an impending rename, due to overwhelming confusion), often flies under the radar. With a relatively small yearly cohort of about fifty graduating students, the program does not begin to compete in size with the L.A. and New York City film schools. However, the department has developed a screenwriting sub-major completely unique to that of other Film and Television studies programs. In short, it forces aspiring writers to actually do the writing, and do a lot of it. In Screenwriting I: The Feature Script, students are challenged to write an entire, feature- length film throughout the course of a single semester. In Writing for Television II: Pilots, students end the semester with an original pilot under their belt, which is perhaps the single most valuable intellectual real estate an aspiring TV writer can bring with her to Hollywood. And while it’s not particularly in the campus spotlight, the University of Michigan film community is always eager to do more. Students across disciplines flock to organizations like Filmic and M-agination, both clubs that develop and produce original films. There’s an eagerness to create and collaborate, and this energy is palpable. Ann Arbor, in its own way, is a little movie mecca. Home to the annual Ann Arbor Film Festival, what other college town can boast two movie theaters within a five minute walking distance of central campus? Los Angeles is a different beast all together. Celebrity spottings occur daily, traffic is horrible and, somewhere, an assistant is being yelled at for getting the coffee order wrong. And yet, the SAC department still found a way to bring a piece of Ann Arbor to Hollywood. With the help of two particularly generous Michigan alumni, Kelci Parker and Dan Pipski, the department was able to put on a speaker series for all the SAC majors interning in Los Angeles. At weekly sessions, interns had the opportunity to talk with industry executives, writers, directors and producers. It was the exclusive University of Michigan scoop, and somehow, I always left with a renewed sense of hope. Maybe, it wasn’t all just a pipe dream. So, I’ve come to the humble conclusion that the only way to be a writer is to write, and write a lot. Perhaps “making it” only comes to those that tell stories without the expectation of fame, recognition or anyone liking what they’ve done. Success is definitely a function of talent, but not without passion and persistence. Some luck (that may come in the form of a helpful Michigan alumnus) helps, too. DANIELLE YACOBSEN Daily TV/New Media Editor TV It was the exclusive University of Michigan scoop, and somehow, I always left with a renewed sense of hope LOVE THE FILM ALL OF IT THERE’S SO MUCH OF IT JOIN FILM E-mail arts@michigandaily.com for information on applying.