PaliHi Leads City with Cutting-Edge Film, Animation Classes

It’s the last day of class before spring break, and Lindsey Son, Palisades Charter High School’s animation teacher, throws a party in class for her 30 students. Everyone’s in a festive mood, but what they’re celebrating today is not merely the pending week-long hiatus, but the sophisticated cartoons Son’s pupils have created. The elephant in the room is that the fact that these teens”some as young as 14”get to learn how to make professional animated shorts while still in high school, which is something of a miracle. And Palisades High’s Visual and Performing Arts Department, which offers Son’s animation courses and film classes taught by filmmaker Kerry Feltham, may well be the NYU Tisch School of the Los Angeles high school system. With high-caliber teachers and state-of-the-art film equipment (Macintosh computers, high-definition cameras, etc.), these college-level technical art classes are not your father’s”or even your older brother’s”film courses. ‘These kids don’t know how lucky they have it,’ Son tells the Palisadian-Post. As Son projects the latest student work to the class, she arrives at a two-minute short in which a stick figure goes through some comical contortions set to speed metal. ‘I asked [the student animator] why he wanted to do that, and he said that he just wanted to create some chaos,’ Son says to her class, eliciting laughter. Sahar Askarinam’s music video assignment tackles James Brown’s R&B classic ‘I Feel Good,’ while another student cartoon milks Right Said Fred’s campy ‘I’m Too Sexy.’ Son, who teaches seven periods a day, has taught animation at Pali since 2002. She’s enjoyed every second of it’12 frames at a time. ‘I feel lucky and honored to be teaching here,’ says Son, a West Los Angeles resident. ‘The students are heaven. I’ve been teaching for 14 years and the kids and the staff are the best I’ve ever worked with.’ Son immigrated to Hollywood from Korea right before entering junior high, and graduated from UC Berkeley and Cal State L.A. After spending her first two years at Pali teaching Web design concurrently with animation, Son scaled back to give the animation curriculum her full attention. Students in first-semester animation learn the basics, while those who take second semester apply those fundamentals toward developing longer and more sophisticated pieces. One such animation project, ‘Back to Tokyo’ (set to The Rubinoos’ tune ‘Go Go Go Tokyo’) helped Christopher Alexakis clinch the Chamber of Commerce’s Mr. Palisades title earlier this month. In awe of CG features like ‘Toy Story,’ Alexakis now toys with pursuing an animation career. In Son’s class, the students, focused on their iMac monitors, love their work. And they clearly respect and appreciate their easygoing teacher. Jocular, energetic and youthfully dressed, the petite Son blends in with her laidback kids. The class feels less student/teacher, but busy and collaborative”as if one visited Pixar Animation Studios on a Monday morning. ‘She’s really nice,’ says Max Groel, 14, working on a cartoon featuring a galloping horse. ‘She knows a lot about Flash.’ Among the Flash techniques Son teaches Groel and his classmates: a motion tween movement, which is the cycled movement of a bouncing ball or passing clouds; and a guided tween, which puts an animated object on a less predictable path, such as the amok U.F.O. that advanced animation pupil Eric Romani, 14, features in his funny and imaginative space aliens short, about a flying saucerful of grays seeking and destroying Earthlings to Slipknot’s raucous ‘Left Behind.’ Several doors down, Kerry Feltham instructs pupils to tag credits on their live-action shorts. Standing before 30 students in typical filmmaker attire (open dress shirt over collegiate T-shirt and Dockers), Feltham, who teaches three film classes, is animated enough to be a character in one of Ms. Son’s student cartoons. Feltham, married to local playwright Diane Grant, recently won a 2008 Best Buy Teach Award of $2,000, and he brings impressive credentials to his position. He served as a producer on the TV mini-series ‘Shogun’ and directed live-action shorts of his own that have garnered acclaim, such as ‘Chicago 70.’ His ‘Great Chicago Conspiracy Circus’ screened at the 1970 Berlin Film Festival, while shorts ‘The Waltzing Policemen’ and ‘Too Much Oregano’ went to Cannes (in 1979 and 1983, respectively). Feltham has seen his class’s equipment change dramatically over the five years that he’s been conducting film courses. ‘When we started, our room had two working cameras, and 12 working computers, but no projection facilities for the students to see their work,’ Feltham recalls. ‘We slowly acquired more cameras and microphones and booms and lights over the years. We’ve put in the film projection area by scrounging two screens from the school scrap yard.’ During summer vacation, ‘we painted the room cabinets and work areas, sewed and installed blackout curtains to darken the place for screenings,’ says Feltham, who also purchased movie posters from garage sales. ‘The technology committee was far-seeing and generous in getting us 30 new Apple G-5 computers for editing. We have eight DV cameras, five HD video cameras, microphones, tripods, lights.’ Screening student-made commercials for the Post, Feltham delights in the wit, sophistication, even cynicism employed by his pupils. After all, sarcasm is a teenager’s greatest weapon, and PaliHi’s film students have an arsenal at their disposal via such adverts as the faux Coke ad, ‘It’s Time to Make Friends.’ Anokhy Desai, Ranna El Naga and Parisa Aframian, all 14, huddle around their station where they use iMovie to edit the commercial they created with Amanda Alvarez, 14. Product of choice: Nike. Desai, who takes Son’s class, explains how she recently had trouble viewing the second ‘Harry Potter.’ ‘I can’t look the same way at movies again because now I know how movies work. There’s no magic to it. It’s all just special effects!’ In another Feltham class, Mychal Creer, 17, messes around with the score for his action film, ‘The Backstab.’ When he’s not playing varsity basketball and football, Creer appreciates rounding out his education by making movies. The future engineering major’s favorite part of the process: editing and laying in special effects. Feltham stresses that his classes are not merely film labs, but critical thinking forums. ‘We spend half the time learning about the media,’ he notes. ‘The Freedom of Information Act, the First Amendment. It makes it really, really real for the students.’ ‘I always drew and painted, I’m pretty good with computers, so I chose animation,’ student Mike Jones says. No regrets from this 17-year-old, who enjoys ‘getting to see my work and the pride I feel after completing a cartoon.’ On one project, Jones went above and beyond his assignment, borrowing the scatological Mr. Hankey”from his favorite cartoon, ‘South Park”’as its star. Son says that her students make her job worthwhile. ‘When I was in school, I had horrible teachers,’ Son recalls. ‘It took me 10 years to learn English. I always wanted to be the opposite of those teachers.’ Son’s LAUSD-subsidized class is technically not a PaliHi course. Son and another technical arts teacher, John Buse of Graphic Design, are on the school district’s payroll, while Feltham receives his paychecks from Pali. But that’s splitting hairs, as parents and students benefit from access to these programs. Son loves it when students take the skills she teaches them and ‘apply this knowledge into other disciplines and use animation for presentations and projects in other classes. It’s a very powerful tool.’ One of Son’s gifted students is Elizabeth Chang, who is currently working on school satire with loose, illustrative designs for her goofy characters that appear Nickelodeon-ready (think ‘Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist’ meets ‘Daria’). Chang, 18, even made a few shorts outside of class assignments and an animated icon for her brother’s clothing Web site. ‘This is my escape class!’ she says. At film, students seem equally enamored with their course. ‘He’s a great teacher,’ says Askarinam of Feltham. ‘He gives us freedom!’ On Feltham, Creer says, ‘He taught me how to do a lot. A teacher can only do so much, then it’s up to you.’ Creer makes a good point. For, on the walk back from PaliHi, this reporter runs into a familiar face: Joan Graves, wife of Palisadian Peter Graves, the actor who played opposite William Holden in 1953’s ‘Stalag 17.’ Of course, ‘Stalag”s director, the legendary Billy Wilder, was no one-trick pony, having helmed ‘Double Indemnity,’ ‘Some Like It Hot,’ ‘The Apartment,’ ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ classic after classic. So this reporter remarks to Mrs. Graves how lucky these students are to have such impressive facilities which iconic filmmakers such as Wilder didn’t have access to as teens in their day. ‘Yeah,’ quips the good-natured Joan Graves without missing a beat. ‘And look what happened to him!’ To download the work of PaliHi’s animation students, hit the ‘Students’ button and ‘Web Pages/Animation’ link at palihigh.org.