Digital media arts program takes flight, dual-credit students win big at recent contest

Digital media arts is just one of the programs offered by UNM-Taos that opens up a career pathway for interested students. Its goals are simple: to prepare digital media arts students for further studies —it’s seamlessly linked to the media arts bachelor degree program at UNM — and to guide students to entry-level jobs in the media arts industry. The program has been growing steadily, not only with UNM-Taos students, but also among high school students participating in the dual-credit program.

Last week, I sat down with Peter Walker, who recently led four of the 100 dual-credit students to a prestigious first place in the 2016 “Canon Filmmaker’s Challenge” for high school and college students as part of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. At the college, he teaches introduction to mass communication online. He also teaches animation and creative media at Taos High School.

“I spent four years doing video production in India and Malaysia, and as an independent filmmaker, I know the importance of participating in competitive events,” Walker said. “I usually figure, ‘Let’s just go and have some fun and see what happens.’ But this time, I had a feeling that we were going to win because these students are really good and they were excited about competing.”

Walker said the judges were all industry professionals selected by the New Mexico Film Office.

“Out of the 11 teams selected for the competition, ours was the only one made up of high school students, and we ended up winning first place. Just to know that these four students can create at that level of work is going to be inspiring to their peers,” Walker said.

Walker said he told the students that the only way the team was going to win is if it had a story to tell.

“I told the students that a lot of the teams were going to film beautiful shots of balloons with music and they will be amazing to look at, but we’ve all seen beautiful shots of blue sky, mountains and balloons. We’ve got to have a story,” he said. “We worked for a couple of hours on a storyline and came up with an animated character named Zia, a 17-year-old kid, dreaming of going up in his own balloon. So we had to combine dreaming fantasy with reality, all in a span of one minute. It was just great working with these awesome students.”

Walker said two of the students are high school seniors who will be going straight into UNM-Taos’ digital media arts associate’s program in the fall. He said each student won a brand-new D-SLR Canon camera and microphone, and the team received about $100,000 in Canon gear for the school’s program.

“And we now have amazing partnerships. I’m in weekly contact with the Canon guys, and we have a partnership with Sony, as well as a cash award for scholarships. Locally, Taos Ski Valley and The PASEO are partners, along with support from the New Mexico Film Office and the New Mexico Film Foundation,” Walker said.

“Our goal for the future of the program is to develop a strong pool of skilled and talented young people that can work in the media industry in Taos first and then go wherever they want. ...We are becoming a vibrant community hub for content production. ... At the same time, we will be producing media that educates the world about Taos.”