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Inside De Anza's film and video school
Photograph by Andy Kjellgren
Being Zaki Lishar
De Anza College film school celebrates 20 years of hands-on education
By Don Hines
During the 'Drawing for Animation: Animal Expression' class in the basement TV studio of De Anza College's Creative Technology Building, one thirtyish man sits on a couch showing another his sketches of Gary the God-fearing Goose, while a twentysomething man in an orange shirt and baggy shorts writes an ad for a Burton snowboard on a wall-sized whiteboard. A blonde woman shows textbook drawings of horses in motion to a quiet black man. Sitting at a newscaster's podium doubling as a worktable, a gray-jacketed Asian woman quietly critiques an East Indian woman's animation portfolio. Distinguishing students from teachers in the class is impossible.
Collaborative learning is a hallmark of the De Anza College Film, Video, and Animation Department, says Zaki Lishar, founder of the department, as he prepares for a 20th-Anniversary screening of student films and videos Nov. 19. "The atmosphere here is flexible and creative. Not as rigid as a four-year college.
"USC [Lishar's alma mater] was much more cutthroat. Here students come in with incredible ideas," and the department allows them to create their films.
Undergraduates at De Anza can photograph, edit, write, or direct films--not just immerse themselves in film theory; practical skills allow them to directly enter the feature film, animation, television or documentary film business.
"I had my own Trimden [film holder] at De Anza," says Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker Dayna Goldfine, calling from Geller/Goldfine Productions office in San Francisco. "A student visiting from S.F. State says she'd never get access to that equipment at her school."
Goldfine says she used techniques learned in a Beginning Lighting class at De Anza to light dance scenes in her first documentary, Isadora Duncan: Movement from the Soul. "We reconstructed her dances everywhere from Stanford's Museum to the lawn of the Potrero Valley house we were caretaking," Goldfine says.
De Anza grad Mark Morris, setting up an interview session with San Francisco 49ers Steve Mariucci, Bill Walsh and Steve Young at the 49ers Santa Clara training site, says the practical experience he gained at the Cupertino campus gave him a jump on his peers.
"Six years ago when I got to NFL Films," Morris says. "I was so far above the other interns. I knew how to edit on a flatbed [a piece of editing equipment.] "De Anza had all the opportunities: camera, films, flatbeds right there to edit on."
Photograph by Andy Kjellgren
Orion Bollinger and Evan Zappel work on a production exercise in the animation department at De Anza College.
De Anza was "definitely more of a teamwork action than USC, UCLA, or NYU" film schools, Morris says.
Morris arranged his internship while attending De Anza College and San Jose State University and working at a Pebble Beach Golf Course hotel. "I bumped into Steve Sabol [president of NFL Films] in the lobby and asked him about interning," he says. "I worked a four-month unpaid internship," after which Sabol hired him as Coordinating Producer.
"I called De Anza when NFL Films won their third straight Emmy Award for editing," Morris says. "Not to boast; just because I was very appreciative."
De Anza is "such a laid-back place. There are very few places where you can walk in the door for the first time and work on a film." Morris says De Anza's best asset was "definitely the instructors."
"Zaki [Lishar] and Mike Holler are great teachers."
Lishar cobbled together the nascent film and television programs from the De Anza Photography Department in 1974.
"Combining Film and Television was a no-brainer," he says. 'Film is the art of this century." The department huddled on the fourth floor of the Flint Center in "The Catacombs" until the Advanced Technology Building opened in 1994. "[The Catacombs] was a temporary home for the department--for 20 years," he says.
The Advanced Technology Building houses a soundstage, control room, editing rooms and screening room on the ground floor; it houses an SGI animation lab on the third floor.
The student mix was always diverse, says Lishar. "We have Silicon Valley engineers returning to school to become filmmakers," Lishar says. "They have a very methodical approach to filmmaking; and they have the resources to make films." Goldfine says the class split was "50/50. Half the students were 19-year-olds going to school for the first time, the other half were older students returning to school to learn the craft of filmmaking."
Photograph by Andy Kjellgren
Zaki Lishar, founder of De Anza's animation department, stands in front of a still from a student production called 'Zoetrope.'
Goldfine had completed a Feminist Studies Bachelors Degree at Stanford when she decided to become a filmmaker. "Going back to Stanford was out of the question," she says. Rather than spend the $15,000 on tuition, I'd rather spend it making a film." The De Anza program didn't limit the time spent completing a film. "As long as you had the energy," Goldfine says. "You could continue working."
Reve De La Mer, a West Coast noir screening at the 20-year retrospective, took two years to complete, Lishar says. Goldfine and her partner Daniel Geller went on to codirect and film the documentary FROSH: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm (1993), distilling 250 hours of raw footage into a lively 90-minute film. They then spent three years filming Kids of Survival: The Art and Life of Tim Rollins & K.O.S., documenting Tim Rollins' art group K.O.S. based in the bombed-out South Bronx. The documentary aired on Cinemax Network in 1998 and received an Emmy Award in September.
Their sequel to FROSH, titled Now and Then: From FROSH to SENIORS, screened in Palo Alto and San Jose last month.
The most notable animated film was Joe Murray's Rocco's Modern Life, which ran on Nickelodeon, Lishar says.
Martin MacNamara, the director of De Anza's Animation Program, coproduced the pilot. Because he is well-connected in the industry, MacNamara is able to bring in teachers from SGI, Pixar and Wildbrain.
The animation students recently returned from a field trip to Happy Hollow Zoo in San Jose's Kelley Park, where they studied animal movement. "Did you go to that 'Anatomy of an Animal' workshop?" one student asked another; "these paleontologists passed around skulls."
On the whiteboard is a list of artists to study that week: Daumier, Delacroix, Degas and Giacometti. "Are those animals?" a student asks.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
