School is now a little over a month in, and our center is starting to hit its stride. Students are in the studio writing, brainstorming, filming, and editing daily, and the hunger to create more is growing. The launching of The Lancer TV highlighted the first month, our weekly news program airing on our YouTube Channel. This weekly installed show offers general school updates, important deadlines, and updates from the arts and athletics departments. It has been fun and exciting to see students around campus talking about the show with our LTV crew members and asking when the next episode will be coming out. We hope to improve our broadcast journalism skills and be a resource for our community by offering important updates that students may have missed during the morning announcements.

Additionally, our crew has begun preparing to launch our first episode of Late Night Lancer, a monthly installed program to bring our community a little bit of fun and entertainment. Drawing its inspiration from industry staples like Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show, LNL will feature a rotation of hosts, guest speakers, musical guests, and many more. Our hope for Late Night Lancer is to bring a different vibe to our channel and feature students and teachers from other departments of La Salle to facilitate collaboration among our many school disciplines.

In that same light, we have green-lit the production of our first collaborative La Salle feature film, which will be the capstone project of one of our juniors, Mario Cassina. Mario, along with the help of many other students, will be directing his first creative narrative that will feature screenwriting from Mr. Poyner’s creative writing class, acting from Mr. Drummy’s drama department, music and original scores from Mr. Z’s Lancer musicians, and all camera/lighting/grip work from the crew members of the Cinematic Arts Center. This will be a significant endeavor that will probably take the majority of the school year to complete. Still, it is a smaller-scale example of how films are created from start to finish for our students. I am very excited to help guide the crew on the project.

Finally, our studio has been a fantastic collaboration space. Cameras and lenses are being used daily, and students continue to improve their skills in camera operation. Our students have also all been onboarded onto Adobe Suite, allowing them to utilize the vast array of editing applications available in the Adobe Creative Cloud. As an Adobe partner school, students have also benefited from AI tutorials recently incorporated into Adobe with the increasing prevalence of AI in our technology. It has been a busy first month of school, and we are incredibly grateful for the opportunity afforded to us by the Cinematic Arts Center.

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By: Akinty Carter