Gagan Diesh, a senior instructor for the Digital Design program and founder of DesignStamp, will deliver a web design presentation at the Vancouver Public Library on Tuesday, July 18.

Diesh will provide tips for successful web design and discuss the essentials of the user experience, one of the most important subjects in modern design. Diesh has “five steps to better visual web design,” which he will describe using examples. As well, Diesh will offer a brief history of the web, the state of design in the present-day (good, bad, and ugly), and what to expect from web design in the years to come.

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The celebrated Hollywood Sound Designer Randy Thom visited the VFS Sound Design department on Wednesday July 26, 2006 to talk with a packed theatre of students and faculty about his many experiences working in the field for over twenty years. Randy Thom began his career as an assistant to the preeminent Sound Designer Walter Murch on Francis Ford Coppola’s classic war film Apocalypse Now, and he shared with the VFS audience some of the challenges he faced to put together that film. Apocalypse Now was mixed for nine months, one of the most intense periods of work being the week before the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, seven days during which Thom worked 142 hours. Thom showed one of the most famous clips from the film, often noted for its masterful sound design, the opening scene with Martin Sheen’s character hung-over in his hotel room in Saigon, listening to the fan spinning on the ceiling and the sound of helicopters in his memories of the war.

Once finished Apocalypse Now, Thom began working for another independent filmmaker named George Lucas. Thom worked with the sound departments on the final two installments of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. He told VFS that Ben Burtt had recorded sound effects for a full year in advance of the beginning of principal photography on the original Star Wars film. Thom was quick to point out that the longer you have to work on something, the more opportunity there is for experimentation, error, and improvement, and ultimately, the better the film turns out. In today’s film world, time is a much-needed commodity, and if Thom had any criticism of the film world today, it was that tighter schedules and large crews can sometimes mean that the sound design suffers.

Photos: Tin Wong (Sound Design Student)

Today, Thom is a full-time Sound Designer for LucasArts and was recently promoted to Director of Sound Design for Skywalker Sound, and has worked as head Sound Designer on The Incredibles, Forrest Gump, Polar Express, and more than sixty other films. For Cast Away starring Tom Hanks, the director Bob Zemeckis gave Thom perhaps his greatest creative challenge as a Sound Designer, one that he described in great detail to the VFS students. Zemeckis told Thom that for the first hour of the movie there would be no music, and that he could not use the sounds of birds, insects, just wind and surf – an incredibly limited palette of sound and difficult to record. Using only these two sources, Thom was required to paint a portrait in sound of the solitude, suffering, and resilience of Hanks’s character Chuck Noland. Thom explained the process of recording hundreds of waves breaking on the beach and layering them in the studio to create the right levels of wetness, white noise, and intensity to match the mood of the scene. Wind was just as tricky, Thom said. His Foley assistants squeezed and twisted wicker to match the sounds of palm trees creaking, and the whole crew traveled to the deserts of Arizona to capture the sound of wind and trees separate from ocean sounds.

After the event was over, students had an opportunity to get Thom’s autograph and ask him questions one-on-one, which he was more than happy to oblige. The event was a great success, and VFS looks forward to the next time Randy Thom has a chance to drop in.

“My former boss would use the term ‘skunkworks’ when referring to projects he was working on that nobody else knew or cared about but him,” says Jeff Pohorski, Film grad. “So I borrowed the name and started up Skunkworks, Inc.”

Shortly after, Jeff’s life got very interesting, “I found out that Skunkworks was the name of the secret weapons division of Lockheed Space and Missiles that began during World War II.” Under the threat of legal injunction and physical torture - that has neither been confirmed nor denied - Jeff changed his company’s name to Skunkfilms. Since then, things have been relatively injury-free.

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Members of the VFS filmmaking community once again topped the list at this year’s Leo Awards, British Columbia’s foremost film industry awards body.

VFS community members took home numerous awards including Best Short Drama, Best Cinematography in a Feature Length Film, Best Student Production, Best Makeup in a Feature Length Drama, and Best Screenwriting in a Youth or Children’s Program or Series. They were nominated for dozens more.

Best Cinematography / Best Supporting Performance by a Female

Aubrey Nealon, a graduate of the Film Production program, can add Best Cinematography and Best Supporting Performance by a Female in a Feature Length Drama to the long list of awards already acquired by his film A Simple Curve, the tale of a young man growing up in British Columbia’s Slocan Valley. A Simple Curve also featured at the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival, to wide acclaim.

Best Screenwriting in a Youth or Children’s Program or Series

Sarah Dodd, an instructor in the Writing for Film, TV, and Interactive Media program, was recognized for her screenwriting on the YTV hit Zixx: Level Two, taking home the Best Screenwriting in a Youth or Children’s Program or Series award. “I don’t usually run around blowing my own horn,” admits Sarah, “but it’s one of those things that reflects well on the Writing department’s faculty.”

Best Student Production

Mark Shirra’s 3D Animation & Visual Effects student film A Great Big Robot From Outer Space Ate My Homework – which has already been recognized at this year’s SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre festival – went on to win Best Student Production. Mark Shirra was up against some stiff competition, however, as three of his five competitors were also VFS grads: Elizabeth Lenning, David Yabu, and Michael Fallik.

Best Makeup in a Feature Length Drama

Rebeccah Delchambre, an instructor in the Makeup Design for Film & Television program, won Best Makeup in a Feature Length Drama for her work on Vic Sarin’s newest, Murder Unveiled. In 2003, Rebeccah’s work on Steven Spielberg’s Taken also received an Emmy nomination.

Best Short Drama

Perhaps the most important victory this year belongs to Larry Lynn, Film Production instructor and director of the Best Short Drama Broken House. The film was an experimental project written by Unit X, a team of underage offenders presently incarcerated at the Burnaby Youth Correction Centre. “This is a project that came out of trying to help these kids find a little self respect,” says Larry. “They’ll have that in spades now because everyone got out of themselves and gave love to other human beings.” Broken House also starred several VFS Acting for Film and TV students – including Harold Warren in the lead role – and was edited by Acting staff member Jim Norman

Numerous other VFS community members can claim victory in relation to the films honoured this year. For instance, Amy Wong, a graduate of the VFS Digital Design program, created the website for Eve and the Fire Horse, a multiple award winner.

Vancouver Film School congratulates all of its valued and talented employees, instructors, students, and graduates on their wins and nominations this year!

The 1950s and 1960s were truly France’s golden age of cinema, producing such auteurs as Truffault, Godard, and Varga. Taking up the reins on the future of French filmmaking is Bertrand Normand - VFS Film Production grad and rising documentician.

Bertrand is the director of two very interesting, very different, and very moving documentaries. The first is a 52-minute film called Thamanya: A Hope for Burma. “It’s about the greatest Burmese Buddhist saint in contemporary history. It was broadcast on Odyssée in France and ABC Australia.” Thamanya was also exhibited at four film festivals around the world and won an award at the Toulon Film Festival in France.

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