San Diego State’s Television, Film and New Media Department swept the student long-form film production category at the regional National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy Awards held June 18, bringing in four total awards, including one for the craft of editing.
The awards will make their way to the Professional Studies and Fine Arts building, where they’ll be put on display soon.
The three long-form films; “No Way Home,” “Hollywood Hell: Downfall,” and “The Last to Leave,” were the result of class projects involving both undergraduate and graduate students.
Social issue takes the spotlight
Brian Garcia’s drama, “No Way Home,” almost never made it to production. After pitching his idea for a story about the social issue of sexual abuse, it failed to accumulate the necessary peer votes that would excel it to production.
“It’s a film about a girl who was molested by her uncle and threatened by him that he would kill her if she told anyone,” Garcia said. “I wanted to show that a lot of girls have been abused, and they don’t talk about it or people blame the girl and not the guy.”
Garcia’s TFM professor and filmmaker Greg Durbin encouraged him to continue, despite it not being voted in. Garcia listened, dropped the class and proceeded to write, edit, direct and co-produce the film with Kristin Hansen.
Personifying pumpkins and Hollywood Hell
Hansen and Casey Nakamura each won two Emmys at the event, and worked together on “Hollywood Hell.”
“The story is about Vick who is a snub Hollywood producer, Ari Gold from Entourage-type character who is on his fifth Oscar win but has a heart attack on the red carpet and dies,” Nakamura said. “He ends up going to hell where he meets Satan. Satan pitches him a script and says you have to make this movie in order to go to heaven.”
“Hollywood Hell” is part of a six-episode web series viewable on Nakamura’s website.
San Diego native Nakamura also won an award as editor of “Pumpkin,” a four-minute long comedy / adventure created last fall that personifies squash.
“It’s a simple story about a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch that wants nothing more than to be a jack-o’-lantern,” Nakamura said.
“It puts you in the spot of the pumpkin as it goes through the trials of trying to be picked by a person.”
Nakamura said that the day after Halloween, he drove around to eight local pumpkin patches to grab 70 pumpkins for the production which was shot in SDSU’s parking lot X.
“At every single one there was a mob of people trying to get free pumpkins to plant for next season. So at every pumpkin patch, literally, I was racing with the wheelbarrow, bringing my cart and dumping it, filling it up, coming back, dumping it, but I got enough,” Nakamura said. “And most of them for free.”
The effort was well worth it for Nakamura who brought his parents with him to the Emmy awards banquet (his father Karl Nakamura made an appearance in “Pumpkin”). This was the first time he submitted his work to NATAS and was nominated for three awards.
Both Nakamura and Garcia envision themselves eventually moving to Los Angeles to work, but for now Garcia will return to his native Bay Area this week to prepare for graduate school at San Francisco State University. Nakamura will finish his graduate degree at SDSU next year.
Other SDSU student Emmy award winners include Brandon Stockwell, Stephen Crutchfield, Mars Huerta, Jonathan Knapp for “Hollywood Hell”; and Pat Clark for “The Last to Leave.” Nick Zerance was also nominated for a film he worked on with Nakamura called “Serene.”
To see the Emmy Award winning films “Hollywood Hell,” and “Pumpkin,” visit www.caseynakamura.com.
For more information about “No Way Home,” visit www.reckwave.com.
