Imagine watching video footage of Olympic athletes training, dance rehearsals, skateboarding tricks—all from a first-person point of view. Google Glass teases the possibility of seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes. Last February, Google opened up a competition for the distribution of its new ‘glasses’ called Google Glass Explorer. In order to enter, contestants—who had to be US citizens over 18 and capable of throwing down $1,500 for a Google Glass—entered by tweeting at Google ‘#ifihadglass’ followed by a 50-word or less proposal. Google chose 8,000 winning tweets and began distributing Google Glass prototypes this spring and summer to the new “Glass Explorers.” As Google Glass became a tangible reality, the question of how the new technology would affect journalism became unavoidable. Was this going to be the next new technology to shake the journalism world? Tim Pool, a multimedia journalist who became well known for his live streamed footage of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City, received his Google Glass just days before heading to Turkey to cover the protests there last summer. What was most exciting to Pool about using Glass to film instead of other devices was obvious: Glass is hands free. Glass relies on Bluetooth or an Android to connect to the Internet, so Pool had to find ways to keep his streaming live (he often carries multiple SIMs so he can switch operators when necessary), but that did not detract from his excitement that he could film hands-free. In a Guardian article from July, Pool explains that, “when there’s a wall of police firing plastic bullets at you, and you’re running through a wall of tear-gas, having your hands free to cover your face, while saying ‘OK Glass, record a video’, makes that recording process...

SFUAD Film major Sara Esparsa talks about the differences between Victoria, Spain and Santa Fe, New Mexico, along with some of her favorite aspects of Santa Fe. In the end she says, “Santa Fe is a great opportunity to be yourself and to create...

The Screen Presents: Oct. 25-31 Una Noche, Would You Choose Family or Freedom? Winner of Tribeca Film Festival’s 2012 Best Director Award, Lucy Mulloy’s Cuban drama tells a daring tale of a young Havana criminal trying to escape to Miami. Beth Accomando of PBS.org says, “Molly captures the Cuban spirit of energy, resiliency, resourcefulness, and passion. She does an impressive job of blending an intimate story of friends with a meticulously observed portrait of Havana.” Muscle Shoals, Most Talked About Documentary Is Still Playing! The true story of the small town with a big sound credits Tennessee’s spiritual “Singing River” as the birthplace of America’s most celebrated music. From the FAME Studios of Rick Hall, blacks and whites worked together in the heat of Alabama’s racial hostility to create what is called the “Muscle Shoals sound.” To attest to Shoals reputation are artists Gregg Allman, Bono, Clarence Carter, Mick Jagger, Etta James, Alicia Keys, Keith Richards, and Percy Sledge. In a documentary “propelled by gorgeous music and rich anecdotes,” David Gritten of The Telegraph calls the story “joyous, uplifting and as funky as the music at its heart.”   Turandot (Royal Opera), Performance at the Screen Straight from London’s Royal Opera House, Director Andrei Serban brings forth the enchanting voices of Lise Lindstrom and Alasdair Elliott. The story? Princess Turandot has sworn that no man shall marry her unless he can correctly answer three riddles. Prince Calaf, captivated by Turandot’s beauty, takes up the challenge, determined to win her heart or die in the attempt. With a rich sound accompanying this dark and erotic fairy tale, the show guarantees an adventure in a beautiful but savage world. Playing at 11 am, Sun. Oct. 27. Tickets on sale here.    Visit thescreensf.com for movie times....

Cristina Kahlo, great-granddaughter of Guillermo Kahlo and great-niece of Frida Kahlo, is a practicing photographer and member of Maestro Julio Galindo’s Platinum Print Workshop in Mexico City. She visited Santa Fe this October to attend the Alternative Photographic International Symposium sponsored by Bostick and Sullivan, Inc. and chatted with The Jackalope Magazine about her relationship to photography. Kahlo’s photographs will be on exhibit at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s Marion Center  Gallery with four other photographers until Nov. 8. The following interview has been edited for brevity. Jackalope Magazine: When did you discover photography? Cristina Kahlo: My father was an amateur photographer—he was always playing with cameras. The darkroom was a place for adults. Children were not allowed. There was a special lock on the door so that children could not get in. So when I was 10 or 11 years old and my father invited me in, it was like I was being allowed into a forbidden room. He enlarged a picture of a family picnic and showed me how to submerge the photo paper in the chemicals, and that moment of seeing the image appear on the paper was magic. That is when I discovered what it means to make a photograph, and the moment when I fell in love with photography. JM: How did you pursue that newfound love? CK: My father died young. He was 42, and I was 13. But after he died, his darkroom was still in the house. A brother of a friend of mine did photography, and he said, ‘you like photography, don’t you,’ and he showed me the ABCs. That’s how I started printing. Then when I was 16 years old, I started at the Escuela Activa de Photographia, the only school...

“Join us for a weekend of fun in Santa Fe,” the email read, but it wasn’t as corny as it sounds. If anything, Family Weekend at SFUAD—student showcases, awesome food, and a trip to Albuquerque—was just a front. The truth? Parents wanted to see their kids and the kids (admit it!) wanted to see their parents. I was still reluctant when my mom asked if we could do Family Weekend. I’m a senior, I thought, it’ll just be freshman families. Or I’m from Santa Fe, I’m not far enough to miss them. But it wasn’t just parents of freshmen who attended this weekend and as soon as I saw my mom, dad and brother Friday night, I couldn’t wait for the events to start. My mother, Jeanette, had attended the College of Santa Fe for a year while pursuing a degree in landscape design. When she read the email about Family Weekend, she turned to my dad, Edward, and said, “would you like to see your daughter?” He was in. My brother, Jesse, graduated last year from New Mexico Tech and is now a full time employee of the Los Alamos labs. He wanted to see his sister. He didn’t care what we did. Art, in general, is not discussed much in my family, but after checking in on Friday and drinking some wine (or sparkling water in my mom’s case) and eating some cheese in the library, I sent them into the Garson Theater to watch Middletown. Afterwards, they had the following to say: Mom: “You’re born, you die, it’s about everything in between.” Jesse: “It’s the little things in life.” Dad: “It was different.” Saturday began with a good lunch and it ran into some student showcases, including a visit to the...

The Screen Presents: Oct. 18-24 Birth of the Living Dead, Vietnam and Zombies! Ever wonder where the billion dollar zombie industry came from? In 1968, college dropout George A. Romero shocked a society, already infected by the Vietnam war, by creating a film in which the dead arose to eat the living. In his low budget film, Night of the Living Dead, Romero horrified his audience with gruesome action and detailed makeup. This documentary explores how one brave move of cinema redefined counterculture and commented on the realities of war. Rebecca Alvin of the Provincetown Magazine calls it a “brilliant deconstruction of [a] classic groundbreaking movie.” Opens Friday. Opening Weekend Screening Includes Double-feature with Night of the Living Dead Shepard and Dark, the Untold Story of Sam Shepard’s Closest Friendship In the early 1960s, Sam Shepard, Pulitzer Prize winner and Academy Award-nominated actor (The Right Stuff), meets Johnny Dark, a homebody who becomes Shepard’s friend and pen pal. Despite dramatic differences in their lives, Shepard and Dark remain friends, even living together when Dark marries an older woman whose daughter would become Shepard’s first wife. In 2010, Director Treva Wurmfeld begins filming the friends after they agree to publish their many years worth of correspondence. Treva’s documentary captures the bond of two unlikely men sifting through history, acknowledging all the good and bad memories. David Fear of Time Out New York calls the film, “an ode to a long-lost era of bohemia, an insightful look into male psychology and pathology, a valentine to the art of letter writing and an illustration of how the past is never dead, because it’s not even past.” Opens Friday. Featuring Introduction and Q/A with Director Treva Wurmfeld Fri. Oct. 18, 7 p.m. Tickets on sale now. Live: Spartacus...

LA Times book critic David Ulin is loathe to give advice. Or so he said, during a Q&A during his visit to the Santa Fe University of Art and Design last week. However, the entirety of Ulin’s visit to SFUAD was an inadvertent how-to course for writers. First and foremost, says Ulin, “Writing is a practice, not a religion!” Ulin learned this by pursuing a job that challenges his writing skills daily. Ulin’s job and his personal writing are a part of the same world: Writing criticism is a “writerly practice,” and he works each day to craft reviews that are “also satisfying reading experiences.” That said, writing on a deadline, another aspect of Ulin’s job, “removes the preciousness” from the work. With a new story due every day, it is imperative for a writer to be able to crank words out and let them go as soon as the final draft goes to the editor. This is coming from a man who worked on a novel for nearly thirty years before he scrapped it, though he could have worked on it until he was eighty. “It’s important to remember that all writers are a part of a conversation,” says Ulin, “and if nobody ever sees your work, you’re not really taking part.” Which leads to another recommendation: Get your work out there. Ulin is a private writer. He never reads works in progress at public readings. Yet that is exactly what he did in O’Shaughnessy last week. “I keep sharing this piece at readings,” he said, “as if to light a fire under my ass to finish it.” Having a fire under the ass is important for getting work done, and one way to help keep it lit is to say “yes” to...

“Plain text,” says GigaOM Editorial Producer Rani Molla, “is just not how we think and learn anymore. We don’t memorize—we search. It’s just more efficient.” There are many ways to share and receive information, and Molla works in the visual realm of storytelling. Molla’s jobs range from helping co-workers post and arrange photos, to writing about design and how to access information visually, to creating data visualizations that help make statistics more reader-friendly and accessible. “From a photograph,” explains Molla, “we can infer an entire story.” Molla finds ways to visually represent information so that it is as interesting and engaging as a photograph. By showing statistics in chart, graph or diagram form, she makes data more approachable. It is often faster and easier to take information in visually than to sit down in front of a block of text that explains data through writing. Writing is still absolutely important—it provides analysis for the visual information—but having a comprehensible representation of the hard facts being analyzed can only benefit a written story. “Nobody can argue with numbers,” says Molla, “they’re objective—so if you can tell the story behind the numbers in a comprehensible way… that’s so exciting!” Diagrams and charts—especially when made interactive—can also make information more personally applicable to a viewer. If readers hover their mouses over a map to receive place-specific statistics, the numbers might carry more weight than if they just hear a national average. The interactivity of maps and charts is another way for people to easily engage with news and information. Still, even numbers can be presented in un-objective ways. Telling stories through charts and graphs is, like all narrative, about perspective. One study, published in The Washington Post, shows a notable increase in Netflix usage in the United...

“The best short films are student shorts,” says Jacques Paisner, executive director and co-founder of the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival. In its fourth year, the festival’s four-day event, Oct. 16-20, will be held at the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Lensic Performing Arts Center, The Screen, and the newly opened Jean Cocteau Cinema in downtown Santa Fe. Dedicated to screening independent films, Paisner shares that a good amount of the festival’s 2013 submissions, as of March 1, came from the student population. Filmmakers, like those from SFUAD’s Film School are provided resources, “great equipment,”as Paisner puts it, which allows for the ideal collaboration experience. “If you’re in directing class…you’ll work with a writer from the writing class and that creates a really good short film,” he says. Furthermore, the shorts can act as a “calling card” because, according to Paisner, the festival circuit is one of the only places students gain exposure. It is here they can say,”‘look I’m a student filmmaker, collaborate with me.” For two of SFUAD’s own film students, the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival was a tremendous opportunity to expose their work. “We were planning on entering the festival before we shot the film,” says SFUAD film major Seth Fuller, whose film U46-Anomaly (Anomaly in the SFIFF listings) will be screened for the SFIFF at 9 p.m., Oct. 16 at the CCA. “We went into it trying to make it as polished as possible, to be a product to showcase what we are capable of. With that being said, we wanted to focus on the local community first since we are local filmmakers.” Fuller’s 13-minute short, shot last year in collaboration with New Mexico local Scott Hussion (producer) and fellow student Emmett Meade (producer/editor), is categorized as a sci-fi drama and...

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northern New Mexico recently held its annual gala, a fundraising event for the organization, this year held at Buffalo Thunder Hotel, drawing volunteers from all over northern New Mexico—including Santa Fe University of Art and Design. “Preparing an event like this is always hard, but fun at the same time. It is really important for Big Brothers Big Sisters since it’s one of the sources from we get most of the funds of the year for the kids,” says Chris Leslie, one of the organizers of the event. A lot of different business and people from all over northern New Mexico donated items ranging from furniture and jewelry to hotel rooms and trips. SFUAD student Dani Vondrak, a regular volunteer for BBBS, helped gather volunteers for the event. “On the event day we showed up and ask some of the people who were in charge what we could do to help out, and a lot of them were telling us that we should be behind the booths of the art pieces or vacations that are bet on, to kind of exemplify what they were about and explain why they should bet on that,” says SFUAD student Victoria Ann Dailey. This event also was an opportunity for some of the students to put their skills to use. Charles Austin Ross, a film student, helped in the gala with his camera: “I got this project by a stroke of luck. I was talking to Ron Nunnely over at the [Driscoll Fitness Center] and a friend and member of the gym came in to talk to him. Chris Alexander of Big Brothers Big Sisters was that friend, a really nice guy. He asked my major and I told him Film and so he extended an offer my way.” After the auction,...

“As far as the Internet is concerned,” says Cordillera Productions Executive Director Jason Jaacks, “we are dealing with a Model T. There’s no V-8 here, And two weeks ago, we were like the Flinstones.” The Internet is still young in its development, but changing quickly. As it continues to grow and evolve as the leading tool for information sharing, documentarians like Jaacks are looking for ways to adapt storytelling to the Internet. Jaacks shared these thoughts in a lecture, “Documentary Without Borders: The Future of Storytelling in the Internet Age” on campus Oct. 3. According to Alenty, an Internet rating company, the average viewing time for a single web page is 33 seconds. Jaacks, a second-year student at the Berkeley School of Journalism and a 2009 graduate of the College of Santa Fe’s documentary studies program, is exploring storytelling techniques to engage viewers with attention spans shaped by the web. In order to create narratives that can hold an Internet user’s attention, Jaacks is experimenting with telling visual stories that have multiple narrative arcs and points of entry and that are interactive for the viewer—essentially interactive online movies. Jaacks cites Hollow as an example and source of inspiration for multimedia visual documentaries. The ‘movie’ explores the stories of more than 30 residents of McDowell County, W. Va. Online, Hollow consists of several visual timelines, made up of still and moving images, which can be scrolled through at the viewer’s leisure. Along the way are links to the detailed narratives of the stories featured on the timeline. The first time that Jaacks visited Hollow’s website, he spent two hours on it, putting the 33 second average viewing time to shame. Jaacks began telling stories through several mediums with his senior thesis as a student at CSF. His...