Arts Education | NW Education

Making Work of Art, Part 3
BUILDING NETWORKS OF SUPPORT

The Northwest Academy's community ties offer local evidence of the growing climate of support for arts education. Grants from the Meyer Memorial Trust, philanthropists such as Arlene Schnitzer, and a number of corporations helped pay for much of the school's equipment and furnishings. The school's 20-member board of directors brings together artists, civic leaders, professionals, and executives from such worlds as real estate, lumber, and accounting. Board members serve as mentors and host job shadows.What they get in return is a pool of potential employees and a broader network of support for their art or industry.

Two or three afternoons a week the school opens its doors to visiting professionals in a "lunch event," a forum where people from the real world tell students about different occupations and the backgrounds they require. A far cry from traditional career days, lunch events have featured renowned Portland artists -animator Will Vinton, filmmaker Gus Van Sant, musicians Michael Allen Harrison and the members of Pink Martini-in addition to CEOs, a veterinarian, a former governor, even a nautical archaeologist.

With multimedia industries flourishing in Portland, the school's media arts program has built a stable of local experts. Musician and sound designer Brian Rose first visited the school for a lunch event. Soon afterward, he was recruited to teach sound design and audio engineering. Rose, 43, built the academy's sound lab from the ground up, offering advice on equipment decisions and calling in favors from colleagues to stretch the school's budget as far as possible.

The comprehensive media arts program allows students to explore how film, audio, and computer applications work together. Students get an overview of videography, film editing, and storyboarding, and become proficient on software such as Photoshop, Premier, and SoundEdit Pro. In scriptwriting classes they learn the function and structure of a scene, then expand their storytelling skills to the entire plot. Camera-eye classes teach different lighting, composition, and camera techniques for recording images, while Web design classes examine digital artistry. Rose's sound design students "burn" CDs and record their own soundtracks, and see how sound effects enhance their film or video projects.

Despite the school's attention to cutting-edge technology and real-world skills, Rose believes the greatest thing the school offers its students is the opportunity to "pursue their art for art's sake," something he didn't get when he was growing up in Portland. "I was a 4.0 student with a 3.0 attitude," Rose says. "When I was in high school we had a stage band and a pep band-usually what sports required. It didn't inspire me much. A school like this would have inspired me to pursue the artistic aspects of my music."

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