Motion Pictures

Recent University of Miami School of Communication graduate, Brody Gusar, M.F.A. ’09, is off to Florida Supercon to showcase his new film, The Next Big Thing. Directed, co-written, edited, and produced by Gusar, the film was also produced by three other UM alumni, Mustan Dawood, M.F.A. ’09, Krystyna Ahlers, B.S. ’10, and Brendan Merrill, B.S.C. ’08, and co-written with Iain Roush. Ahlers acts in the film as well. The Next Big Thing is a dark comedy about friendship, revenge, and the lust for fame. The main character, Julian, always wanted [...]

Erica Larence, a Motion Pictures major and member of the Class of 2013, recently published a book, Caine and Mabel. The book is about a girl who adopts a rescue dog after her best friend moves away. Larence said that the idea for the book came from her rescue dog, Caine, who is named after the Miami Hurricanes. Larence wrote the book in January of 2015 and then edited it for about a month. In March, she found Vi Pham, the illustrator of the book. “It was a really cool [...]

When he joined a fraternity in freshman year at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, Miami native Alejandro Victor Pallares never imagined someday he’d be shooting a film about the process. Now Pledge, centered on members of a fictional fraternity, will debut at this year’s Canes Film Festival, April 29-May 1, at the University of Miami Bill Cosford Cinema. Pallares, 23, a second-year graduate student in the UM School of Communication motion pictures program, is scriptwriter and director of the film, his first, though he’s worked on the films of others.  “I [...]

The Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and the University of Miami’s Norton Herrick Center for Motion Picture Studies have joined forces with the Estate of Buky Schwartz to preserve the late artist’s extensive archive of multimedia works. From the mid-1970s, Schwartz’s installations employed video and closed-circuit television to shape a viewer’s perception of sculpture and space. MIAP graduate student Eddy Colloton has cataloged, assessed, and planned for the preservation of Schwartz’s video works as part of a year-long thesis project, [...]

University of Miami School of Communication will host Disney Animation Artist Matthias Lechner for a special Q&A and behind the scenes look at the upcoming film, Zootopia, on Monday, February 29, from 3:30-4:30 p.m. As an art director of environments, Lechner collaborated to define the style of Zootopia’s backgrounds and sets. He worked with other members of Walt Disney Animation Studios to create the imaginative world of Zootopia and to describe how the animals played, worked, moved, and lived together. “I came full circle—growing up loving The Jungle Book to [...]