Students in Northeast’s Digital Cinema and Media program learn to use professional cameras, lenses, and lighting in order to have a career in video production.
Recently Northeast Digital Cinema sophomore Adam Lundeen used these tools and the skills he’s learned, to create a beautiful piece for Northeast’s Theatre department.

Learning high-end corporate video production in two years is a challenge. In the second year, students are expected to be able to make high-end videos that can be used for commercial use. Lundeen said, “It gives us the experience of working in a corporate setting. You make something to represent someone else rather than just yourself. You have to be really conscientious of your work.”

Digital Cinema instructor Timothy Miller arrived at Northeast in 1983 and laid the foundation for what is now the Audio and Recording technology program. He soon realized the students would need a companion video program to be competitive in the job market. His dream was realized when the Digital Cinema and Media program began in the 2014-2015 school year. Soon students were creating non-profit pieces for local organizations and program pieces for the college. Miller said, “Today’s media is visual, and there’s always audio with it. You have to have a piece that looks good.”

Miller and Lundeen worked together to plan the high-quality opening shots of the theatre piece and set up interviews to talk about the program. Then Lundeen crafted the piece using digital storytelling techniques he learned at Northeast. Lundeen said, “Planning the shots to make it a beautiful piece as well as tell a story was something I had to focus on.” Miller said,”Doing any piece like this that features a school program allows our students, a student like Adam, to take all of those skills that they have put together, one piece at a time and put it together in a cohesive, over-arching piece that lets them show that they have the mastery of the skills and then get the feedback when they see the result of that.”

The Digital Cinema and Media program produces pieces for other disciplines on campus to help shine a light on what students are learning at Northeast. Miller’s students have created videos for the Elkhorn Valley Museum, Wausa’s Q125, Northeast’s Paramedic, Electrical, and Auto Body programs, various campus clubs, and the Animal Shelter of Northeast Nebraska.

The Viewpoint’s Josh Crim sat down with Miller and Lundeen in Studio 135 to talk about the process of making a video, how this training leads to a professional video career, and problems during the video process that Lundeen had solve.