UNM Film Students Mix Silence With Special Effects

Terence Taggart stands alone on the KiMo Theatre stage. In black slacks and a vest, white button-up shirt and black bow tie, Taggart adjusts his white gloves. As he prepares for the next scene, Kirby Ann Witte yells from afar, “Let’s get the next shot set up.”

Cameras are set in place, Taggart adjusts his vest as he takes his place center stage. Claire Sullivan, a camera assistant, holds the camera slate in front of Taggart’s face and Witte yells “We’re rolling!”

This was one take in a series of takes for students in the Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media program at the University of New Mexico.

The group of nearly 15 students is working on an eight-minute film for its Capstone Film Project, a national collegiate program. It is due at the end of the semester in May.

The silent black-and-white film is called “Ritz & Spitz” and was written by UNM student Padraig Taggart.

“I grew up watching the Marx Brothers and have been interested in black-and-white movies for a long time,” he said. “I had this idea of making the two characters magicians and I just went from there.”

The film follows magicians Ritz and Spitz — who differ significantly in their magic styles — as they compete in a magic contest. Ritz is a suave and debonair magician, while Spitz doesn’t take much pride in his appearance, yet is chock-full of comedic high jinks. As each man works to spoil the other’s set, the audience members let the two know how they feel — literally. (There’s a scene where the audience throws fruit, vegetables and popcorn at the magicians.)

Witte, who is studying film and mechanical engineering, is pulling double duty on the project as producer and director. She said a group of students decided to film during winter break because they were able to use the KiMo and it would help them get a jump start on visual effects. The group is supervised by a Sony Imageworks employee for the visual-effects portion.

“The film is going to have a lot of visual effects put in later on,” she said. “We’re shooting things in front of a green screen, and we’ll have the magicians pulling things out of their hats. It’s going to be labor intensive.”

Witte said there will be a lot of editing that will be done in order to get the movie to the eight-minute mark.

“Obviously, we’re shooting a lot more film than we need,” she said. “We’re all pretty new to this, but it’s turning out nicely.”

Witte said she got interested in film when she was finishing high school in Carlsbad.

“When I toured UNM, the film program really made me want to go there,” she said. “But my love for film was solidified when I did a cinematic-arts internship at Disneyworld in Florida. I want to eventually work for Walt Disney Imagineering.”

Walt Disney Imagineering is the master planning, creative development, design, engineering, production, project management, and research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company.

“I understand that it’s going to take more than one application, but that’s what I want to do when I get out,” she said.

Padraig Taggart said the script was written during the fall semester and has taken longer than he had expected. He said the script has undergone numerous changes over the course of the past two months.

“It’s a pretty silly script and has no dialogue until one line at the end,” he explained. “But when there are changes, oftentimes I don’t immediately see why it needs to be changed. The entire process has given me a glimpse of what writing a screenplay would be like in the real world.”

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