A dog caught in the act

Seeing through the eyes of a dog may not seem like an essential part of a college education, but through small video recording adventures like the one happening in the quad, students at Yuba College are learning the skills to one day become the next Joel Schumacher.

“A Day In The Life Of A Dog” was the first lab to get storytelling down and to get some hands-on camera experience for the students. Jeremy Poulos states the class is a lot of fun, and a lot of work. Concepts they learn in lecture are reviewed in depth during lab hours. Some of the things include: film making, script writing, camera editing, producing a finished product to show it off. Some of his students have went on to work at CBS studios in Sacramento. Others went on to UCLA, Northridge Film School, and other California State Universities. The instructor himself is a Yuba College Student who went on to a film program at USC.

Cameras-in-hand, three mass communications students were pretending to pee on a car, crawling on the ground, and barking with a recording camera. For a film project, one of the students was making various motions with his hands and mouth without any sound while directing all these animal-like movements with the camera. The view is suppose to be from a dog’s perspective, meaning we get to see and feel what a dog experiences. The project entailed them producing a short film with the concept: A day in the life of a dog. They were from the Mass Comm 5 class taught by instructor Jeremy Poulos. This is  a 3 unit MCOMM class held in rooms 1713 regular class Mondays 1:00pm till 2:50 pm and the lab Wednesday 1:00pm. till 3:50p.m. in room 1712.

Advanced Mass Comm students Jose Macedo and Adan Jimenez both state the “A Day In The Life Of A Dog” lab is a good starter lab. After Yuba College Jose plans to go on to New York Film Academy located in Los Angeles, California. Another Eccentric Mass Comm student by the name of Mikey Pennington claims that the first film project was interesting and good for practice.  While a student in the Mass Comm Department, Mikey states he is involved in this program currently yet he wants to be a rockstar and he wants to open a major recording studio. He is involved in making music from several different styles and sounds he is a musician at heart and can play several instruments with the guitar being one of them. He is interested in Hardcore, Scream, Acoustic and Rap genres.

The Mass Comm program has been around for about 30 years and the Electrical Movie Making class has been around for about 10 years. Before the Electrical Movie Making class they used actual film which is more expensive and time consuming. The cameras they use now are digital cameras. Film is expensive and harder to work with.  Digital Cameras allows you to put recordings in the computer and edit on the computer, which is a lot easier and faster.

The Mass Comm class here at Yuba College led me on the road to peek into the life of an instructor developing the world’s next Steven Spielberg, and the eager students ready to take on the life of a filmmaker. They are learning all the essentials that help a person tell a brilliant story through a camera. And all this started by looking at life through the eyes of a four legged creature for a day. Dogs everywhere will be proud that finally someone is telling their story.