CAS Quarterly

78 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Chris Newman CAS to become directors, so I try to teach them how to be good "sound directors." James: I started teaching at The Los Angeles Film School. At first, I was part time between gigs. It all started with a class called Production One. With faculty members in the role of department heads and director (I was the mixer), we shot single episodes of known TV shows with the students in every role on the set including 1st AD. The actors were professionals hired for each shoot. We had a nice standing set, that was redecorated as needed. My focus then was really about teaching boom operation, mic placement, mic movement, and understanding the shot. Then after a couple of years, I gained more and more classes, became full time and was eventually promoted to head of sound. I worked more closely in designing the courses, but the emphasis was still on practicums. I specifically taught the correct method of wrapping cable and a lot of boom technique to give the students who wanted to work in sound an entry-level qualification. Then five years ago, I was actually head-hunted by New York Film Academy (NYFA) in Burbank to teach production sound. This has a much stronger academic quotient, but until the recent changes with COVID-19, it was still heavily focused on correct use of equipment and the practicalities of capturing good sound. NYFA has a wide range of offerings to students—everything from four-week introductions to filmmaking, to asso- ciate degrees, BFA degrees, and MA/MFA degrees. The courses I teach are varied, depend- ing on the level of the student and the complexity of the package they are allocated for their projects. One of my favorite courses is the production sound portion of "Sound for Producers," where I get to talk about practical aspects such as location scouts and budgeting. We also have a strong documentary department, and I teach sound mixing to the documentary students. I have even co-led a documentary group on a field trip to the Dominican Republic in the past. Mark: I'd break this down into three phases. First, I grew up in the house of a world-class teacher/mentor, so this model was set deep inside of me and in some way, was a legacy. Then, as I began to be established in the freelance workplace, I'd developed a habit of lobbying for apprentices and interns on my jobs from a kind of "pay it forward" attitude coming out of my recognition of all the mentoring that had come my way. Often, I could find individuals of like-spirit among my above-the-line clients who would support this. It seemed a natural extension of the work and it also kept me sharper by forcing me to organize my thoughts when explaining something to others. Then in the mid to late 1990s, I began teaching full weeklong workshops in Maine at what is now called the Maine Media Workshops. It is a kind of art camp in a small fishing village for grownups in mid-career looking hard at pursuing their real creative dreams under the guidance of very established industry pros. Students came from all over the globe, all ages, and all walks of life. I continue to teach there. In the first few years of doing this inten- sive form of boot camp, I developed a curriculum that is a blend of practical hands-on under the main expression of philosophy of approach to the filmmaking through telling the story with sound, as a musician would in a band or orchestra. This is an analogy of being intensively devoted to your particular instrument as a creative tool in service of the project or story in collaboration with your peer musicians playing their instruments together as a unified whole. The teaching aspect of my career has grown exponentially, and I now lecture and teach broadly and internationally, usually in a university context. Oslo, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Beijing, across the UK, includ- ing the National Film School, and also at Greenwich and others, Ireland, the DGA, The Academy Gold Program, Chapman University, etc. There is clearly a need, as the explosion of film major courses across the globe have a common deficit of func- tional career preparation for production sound mixing. A highly lucrative and cre- ative career is often treated as an after- thought if at all. There is a reason the sound arts are recognized in awards cycles as a primary creative contribution. Academia has a few shining examples out there, but it is in the minority. Chris: I think I started teaching in the 1980s. Primarily, I teach at the School of Visual Arts, but I've also taught at NYU, Columbia, EICTV in Cuba, Montclair State in New Jersey, and workshops all over everywhere. I teach both production sound mixing and re-recording mixing. If you're teaching one, you're teaching the other. David: I began teaching at USC in 1993, four years after I got my master's degree from the same school. I went back because, frankly, many of the faculty at USC at that time had been teaching for decades, and most of them were no longer practitioners (and some of them were hired to teach directly out of school and had little real-

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