Carnegie Mellon Today: When the Academy Awards are broadcast on Feb. 26, several Carnegie Mellon University alumni will be rooting especially hard for “Fences,” one of this year’s 10 Best Picture nominees. You will not see them on the red carpet, nor will their faces appear on screen, but their fingerprints are all over the big screen adaptation of August Wilson’s Tony and Pulitzer-prize winning play of the same name.
4 comments:
It is always so inspiring seeing the work of graduate Design and Production majors. Usually in the school of drama the actors and Musical theater students make the headlines for their work on movies and theater. I saw fences and absolutely loved it. I thought it was an amazing story and beautifully directed. I had no clue that they used a real house to shoot the movie in. I wonder how much of a difference it would have been if they just built one on a sound stage? I loved the feel thought of how the house felt and how the hill district seemed so real and I find out that it was real. I also had no clue how any different costume pieces were involved in the film. The costume design was amazing. I wish they went into more details about Samantha’s role in the costume portion of the movie and what her responsibilities were during shooting.
With or without Carnegie alums working on the show, the concept alone and the restoration of the house set for the movie seems like an incredible way to stage a movie. While I have not seen the film, the idea that the movie crew took a house and completely restored it and modified it to change the movie is one of the coolest set dressing projects I have ever seen--modifying an entire house to use as a movie set is a tremendous job, but also a really cool, detail oriented one that requires so much research. It's really quite cool that Carnegie students are able to work on such interesting projects out of school, and it also makes me feel better about pursuing such an unstable career path. Now I have to see the movie, in order to see how well this project and this concept played out in the film.
I was surprised to find that this article didn't focus primarily on alumni of the School of Drama's Design and Production program. We know how successful the alumni from the School of Drama are, but I found it so fascinating to see what other members of the CMU community are doing. The fact that alumni from the School of Art and the Computer Science program here are also working in the entertainment industry speaks to the diversity of backgrounds that people in the entertainment industry come from. This diverse collaborative environment is something I think we could bring into CMU. Cross-school efforts such as HyperLoop are great opportunities for our students to experience creating work with people of diverse professions, talents, and interests. As entertainment grows in its complexity, this is something that we can expect to see more and more in the professional world and our students should be prepared.
I agree with antionio and thought it was initially surprising that this alumni wasn't apart of the school of drama. This just goes to show how incredible our entire school is. I think that this is a beautiful piece of theatre that needs to be performed anywhere. Now this may seem like a tangent but I don't know where else to write this. If we live in pittsburgh and the August Wilson center is located here, why aren't we doing more August Wilson? I don't think that some of the shows we have chosen are representative in its original casting of the entire group of actors and designers we have ready for their season next year. I personally think we should be doing some of august wilson's work every single year. I think it is important that we embrace and celebrate plays written by people of all races. There has been discussion of lack of representation of people of color (hispanic and black alike) in next year's season. I think our school has wonderful resources at our disposal with the august wilson center and I think it is important that we produce more of his work.
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