Kamehameha School Jumpstarts Film and TV Careers for Native Hawaiians

Hawaii may not seem like an obvious training ground for film and television talent. Yet students at the Honolulu-based Kamehameha High School often find themselves in demand in Hollywood and beyond. Graduates enter top film schools such as USC, Chapman University, and New York University, while alumni have thriving careers as production assistants, editors, directors, and producers at organizations such as VH1 and MTV. What makes this school so successful? It’s a powerful combination that includes a wide-ranging curriculum, hands-on project experiences, top-notch internship opportunities, and an enormously dedicated staff.

Established in the late 1800s as a school exclusively for native Hawaiians, the Kamehameha School system was founded by a direct descendant of King Kamehameha the Great to provide native Hawaiians with the education necessary to achieve productive and economically secure lives. “Native Hawaiians have always been at the lower end of the economic scale,” explains video production instructor Patricia Gillespie. “We take in a large number of orphan and indigent children, and we really try to reach out to them. We have a lot of families who are very poor, so there are a lot of students on scholarship.”

“All film schools use Avid, so it gives our students an advantage if they learn how to use the system.”
- Patricia Gillespie, Video Production Instructor, Kamehameha Kapalama High School, Honolulu

Today, the Kamehameha School system provides kindergarten through twelfth-grade education for students on three campuses. Some board at the school, while others travel as long as two-and-a-half hours each way by bus. The Oahu high school campus alone houses approximately 3,200 students. High-school class offerings include a wide-ranging group of vocational courses plus a full college preparatory program. Classes in Hawaiian language and culture are also available.

 

Real-World Video Production

Part of the rich high-school curriculum includes a video production track, which is overseen by Gillespie and assistant Jay Metzger. Students in the introductory video classes are introduced to all elements of pre-production, production, and post production. By the end of the class, the students will have completed an original music video, mini-feature, or PSA.

Students begin by learning to use various cameras and other equipment in the school’s studio and on location. They learn the basics of scriptwriting and continuity to create truly professional material and edit their own work in media labs equipped with Avid Media Composer and Avid Xpress Pro software.

“The students find the Avid systems very easy to learn and start producing projects on it right away. All the film schools use Avid, so it gives our students an advantage if they learn how to use the system before they go off to college,” says Gillespie, who recently oversaw an upgrade that includes 10 Media Composer software-only stations.

Students can take the video production course repeatedly to gain more advanced skills, and as many as four sections of the popular course run simultaneously. Gillespie prides herself on being a strong advocate for her students’ work. “If their projects turn out well, I’ll send material to local or national contests,” she says, citing student awards received from state, national, and international organizations, as well as on-screen exposure at events such as the World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education (WIPCE) and the Hawaii International Film Festival.

The curriculum is constantly changing to keep pace with the latest technologies. “There is so much to learn - how to burn a DVD, how to upload video to the Web.

 

 

We are always looking ahead and figuring out what skills we need to teach so that students have the skills they need to know before they leave,” says Gillespie, who is particularly eager to test the new ScriptSync feature in the latest Media Composer software. This next-generation, script-based editing tool uses phonetic speech indexing technology to automatically sync text with media, making it fast and easy to call up clips and takes to match lines in a script - a great tool for students’ longer-form documentary work.

Daily video announcements - completely produced by students - also help students learn and apply new skills. These five- to ten-minute broadcasts are aired each morning on TV monitors throughout the school. They include news stories, features, PSAs, weather reports  even surf reports. The announcements are produced using a workflow that mimics a professional broadcast environment with a studio and a control room, so students get a real feel for a live broadcast setting. The setup includes a Deko on-air graphics system used to generate on-screen text for weather and surf reports, lunch menus, and class schedules. A video club is also available for added hands-on learning outside of class time.

“Kamehameha High School is awesome. The facilities and contacts there got me the exposure I needed. Without Kamehameha, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
- Randel Jim, 2006 Graduate, Kamehameha Kapalama High School, Honolulu

The school’s internship opportunities are particularly notable, providing opportunities for students to work at local television stations or for the hit show Lost, which shoots in Hawaii. Students typically rotate in and out of various departments to give them well-rounded exposure and to help prepare graduates for entry into the workforce. Typically, eight students participate in the video internship program each year.

Real-World Success

Randel Jim is an example of a recent success story. A 2006 graduate of Kamehameha Kapalama High School, Jim is currently working in the Los Angeles area as a production assistant. Her credits include a television pilot for the show Knight Rider as well as feature films The Soloist, South of the Border, and Tropic Thunder. She believes that her experiences at Kamehameha High School were critical in helping her to establish a career in the film and television industries so quickly.

 

“I got into Ms. Gillespie’s class junior year, and she started us with cables, cameras, the Avid [editing system]. Then we went right out and started filming,” she explains. “Her assistant, Jay [Metzger], showed us different camera angles and how to edit on the Avid [system] for [commercial] spots and PSAs. Later, we created videos and documentaries.”

During the second semester of her junior year, Jim shot an award-winning video of the school’s state championship boy’s soccer team. “It won an award at a national film festival for students. I think they liked it because it was professionally done. We added a newscaster, and the footage was quick and action packed. The piece was also shown in the Student Showcase at the Hawaii International Film Festival.”

In Jim’s senior year, she had the opportunity to travel to Aotearoa (the native name for New Zealand) as a student videographer for the Kamehameha School’s delegation to WIPCE. It took Jim the rest of her senior year to write a script and edit a 32-minute documentary that won local and national awards and also screened in the Student Showcase at the Hawaii International Film Festival.

Then came Jim’s big break: an internship working on Lost. As one of the first two interns from the school to work on Lost, she had the opportunity to spend three months working in the production offices followed by three months on set. “I learned the basics [in the office], so when I went on set I had an idea of what goes on during production,” she says. Moving to Los Angeles - initially to attend Loyola Marymount University and then to become a production assistant -was a natural outgrowth of her high school internship. “Lost really introduced me to the business. The contacts and friends made there were what put me in touch with people in Los Angeles,” she says.

She believes that her rigorous high-school coursework and ample project opportunities were essential to launching her career. “Kamehameha High School is awesome. The facilities and contacts there got me the exposure I needed. Without Kamehameha, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

CREDITS: Kamehameha Schools. Advanced Video Productions 2006.