Motion Pictures

Dillard High School in Broward County is home to one of the country’s most successful high school jazz bands. Sweet Dillard is a documentary that follows the Dillard High School Jazz Ensemble through its struggles and triumphs during the 2014 academic year. The film, which is almost two years in the making, will premiere on March 6 during the Miami International Film Festival. Two School of Communication professors assisted in the creation of the film: Jim Virga, director, and Dia Kontaxis, editor. They co-produced the film with Mike and Sue [...]

Award-winning Production Designer Jeannine Oppewall is coming to the Cosford Cinema at University of Miami to present on Meaning and Ideas in Film Design on February 9 from 6-7:30 p.m. Sponsored by the Department of Cinema and Interactive Media at the School of Communication at UM, the event is open to the public and admission is free. The presentation will include clips of her work followed by a Q&A session. Oppewall won an Art Directors Guild award for Excellence in Production Design for Catch Me If You Can and a [...]

University of Miami graduate Gretchen Schroeder, B.S.C. in Motion Pictures ’15, accepted a position as an American Cinema Editors Intern. Only two recent college graduates with experience in, and a passion for, film editing are chosen nation-wide to be a part of this four-week program each year. Schroeder is one of only two UM alumni who have been offered this internship; the other UM alumna who interned at ACE is Rachel Schreibman, B.S.C. Motion Pictures ’10, in 2011.  Christina Lane, Chair of the Department of Cinema and Interactive Media, noted [...]

Dr. Christina Lane, chair of the Department of Cinema and Interactive Media and director for the Norton Herrick Center for Motion Pictures Studies, is introducing a screening of Frank Sinatra’s A Hole in the Head and holding a Q&A for HistoryMiami on February 18 at 5:30 p.m.  The event helps kick off HistoryMiami’s multimedia exhibition Sinatra: An American Icon, opening March 4, curated by the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles and commemorating the entertainer’s 100th birthday. A Hole in the Head was filmed in Miami Beach’s art deco hotels and [...]

University of Miami School of Communication alumni The Meza Brothers, a.k.a. Andres Meza-Valdes, B.S.C. ’09, and Diego Meza-Valdes, B.S.C. ’09, are headed to the 2016 Sundance Film Festival to showcase Boniato, their 23-minute short horror film featuring migrant workers on a boniato (sweet potato) farm who cross borders into a supernatural world, a metaphor for the murky underground network into which many undocumented workers fall. This is the Meza Brothers’ eighth short in the horror genre and the first they’ve co-directed with seasoned stuntman/action director Eric Mainade, who came up with the initial story [...]

Father-daughter duo, David Isaacs and Andie Isaacs paired up to create and produce the pilot of an original sitcom Life On Mars that will now premiere at their alma mater, the University of Miami. David Isaacs is a University of Miami School of Communication alumnus that has more than 40 years of experience in production and writing: titles include, M*A*S*H, Cheers, Wings, Frasier, Becker, and Mad Men. Andie Isaacs recruited her father to be executive producer on Life On Mars, which was, at the time, only a rough screenplay written [...]