Oct 29, 2013 | News & Events
This weekend Abilene will again be home to the 24fps International Film Festival. The event will feature 31 short films in three programs Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday night.
If you haven’t been before, 24fps offers a great chance to see entertaining and provocative work from around the world, including films that have already won awards at Sundance and Cannes. Tickets are $10 for one of the showings or $20 for the weekend.
Here are trailers to a few of the films they’ll be screening.
Oct 23, 2013 | News & Events
As we enter the dark stretch of the semester it’s not unusual to see students shuffling listlessly through the library, but this year we’ve noticed this mindlessness is transforming the ACU faculty.
The Learning Studio works closely with our most creative faculty from the humanities and the sciences, professors and instructors, and this year for the first time . . . living and undead.
In our experience, faculty inspire us with their persistent hunger after knowledge and relentless pursuit of an idea at all costs, but this week their devotion to the life of the mind has turned.
Students be warned: they’re after your brains.
Thanks to some great faculty volunteers for our photo shoot and to Krista Cukrowski and Emily Teel for their help with makeup. We had a great time!
Oct 6, 2013 | News & Events
Thanks to so many in the College of Arts and Sciences this week, we had a great visit with Bill Frakes and Laura Heald from Sports Illustrated and Straw Hat Visuals. Bill and Laura were open to working with a wide range of students, so we had a full week.
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Studio Talk with ART 440
Before Bill’s evening presentation in the WPAC Recital Hall, he joined Nil Santana’s Advanced Photography class to reflect on his photo and video work in a three-hour session. Students were able to ask questions about journalistic ethics in sports coverage, lighting technique in his editorial portrait work and see some stunning images.
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James Leddy Boots Project
Then Bill and Laura visited Alvaro Santos, a local bootmaker and owner of James Leddy Boots for a short film project they worked on through the week. On Wednesday they did a site visit and got footage of Al at work in his workshop on Treadaway and then filmed an interview with him Thursday morning before the shop opened.
The Advanced Photography students joined Bill and Laura again on Thursday afternoon downtown at the Paramount. We had a dozen pairs of boots that they would shoot with film and still cameras for cut-aways in the final project, including for most their first experience with a 5k Red Epic cinema camera.
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Lightpainting at Fort Griffin
The week wrapped up with students from the Honors College in a short film colloquium who joined us out at Fort Griffin in Albany. They worked with Bill on some long-exposure photography around the old fort ruins. The students were challenged to think about capturing stars under the big Texas sky. At the same time, Bill and Laura were capturing time-lapse footage on one corner of the site for a film they premiered at a reception in the Shore Art gallery on Friday.
Photograph by Aubree Barnett
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Overall it was an energizing week and we’re thankful to Bill and Laura for their investment in ACU students and to the College of Arts and Sciences for making it possible.
Sep 25, 2013 | News & Events
We’re delighted to announce that next week Sports Illustrated photographer Bill Frakes will be on campus. Bill has covered major sporting events around the world in a career that has spanned profound transitions in journalism and his own work first as a photographer and now also as a filmmaker.
Bill recently served as a chair for the World Press Photo contest for sports photography in 2013 that made final selections from over 100,000 entries. Whether you join us for an evening on the power of storytelling or a less formal setting, we’re confident you’ll leave seeing images on screen and in print in a totally different way.
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Schedule
Oct 1 (Tues), 7:00 pm – Feature Presentation in Williams Performing Arts Center
Oct 2 (Wed), 11:45 pm – Faculty lunch in the Adams Center
5:30 pm – Portfolio Presentation with JMC/Art majors in Don Morris
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Bill Frakes Bio
Bill Frakes is a Sports Illustrated Staff Photographer based in Florida who has worked in all 50 states and in more than 125 countries for a wide variety of editorial and advertising clients.
His advertising clients include Apple, Nike, Manfrotto, CocaCola, Champion, Isleworth, Stryker, IBM, Nikon, Canon, Kodak, and Reebok. He directs music videos and television ads.
Bill has worked in every State in the USA and in more than 130 countries. Editorially his work has appeared in virtually every major general interest publication in the world. His still photographs and short documentary films have been featured on hundreds of Web sites as well as on most major television networks.
He won the coveted Newspaper Photographer of the Year award in the prestigious Pictures of the Year competition. He was a member of the Miami Herald staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of Hurricane Andrew. He was awarded the Gold Medal by World Press Photo. He has also been honored by the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for reporting on the disadvantaged and by the Overseas Press club for distinguished foreign reporting. He has received hundreds of national and international awards for his work.
He has taught at the University of Miami, the University of Florida and the University of Kansas as an adjunct professor and lecturer. During the last five years he has lectured at more than 100 universities discussing multimedia and photojournalism.
In 2010 and 2013 he served on the jury of World Press Photo.
Many years ago, a young American mother named Agnes Frakespointed out images all around her tiny Nebraska town to her four-year-old son Bill: a cat’s shadow, a pool of oil beneath a car, his own name etched in a cookie tray of caramel popcorn. The boy looked at the objects and saw nothing. ‘Look again,’ she said. ‘There is always more there than what your eye sees…’ Twenty-five years later the boy became one of the most accomplished sports photographers in the world.
– James McBride, part of his introduction in the book “Family: A Celebration of Humanity.”
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Sep 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
[This week the Learning Studio was featured on ACU News and we wanted to share.]
This past weekend, more than 65,000 people converged on the New York Hall of Science for World Maker Faire, an international event that speaks its own unique language: makerspaces, hackerspaces, 3D printing, CNC routers and Raspberry Pi.
World Maker Faire is one of 60 events sponsored by MAKE magazine this year to showcase the energy and creativity of a new generation of inventors, hobbyists and programmers. Makers combine cutting-edge technologies and old-fashioned ingenuity in projects spanning robotics, electronics, knitting, photography, rocketry, food and computing.
And this year for the first time, Abilene Christian University was on stage.
Dr. Kyle Dickson (’92) and Dr. James Langford (’78) were reporting at World Maker Faire on work that began last spring to bring a makerspace into the Margaret and Herman Brown Library.
Read the full story on ACU News.
