Industry relations specialist and instructor Evan Coons (right) works with film school students Eric Sandefur and Noah Sampsel at the Compass Film Academy.
Compass Film Academy gets certification
Pete Daly
It’s getting more difficult for Compass Film Academy to fly below the radar.
The 10-year-old private vocational school, which instructs students in movie script writing and film production and is located on Fifth Street near Seward in northwest Grand Rapids, was certified in late May for Title IV financial aid from the federal government. Title IV is offered to college students through Pell grants, Supplemental Educational Opportunity grants, Perkins loans and other subsidized and unsubsidized direct loans.
Last fall, Compass became the only vocational school in Michigan that is focused solely on movie production to be certified by the national Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, and sometime within the next few months, it will formally become Compass College of Cinematic Arts, according to Compass president Keri Lowe.
“We just got preliminary approval from the state” of Michigan to operate as a college, she said. Compass is also now in discussion with some four-year universities in Michigan, regarding “articulation agreements,” which relate to the transfer of credits between schools.
“We used to be proud of being sort of underground,” joked Jill Postma, meaning that Compass was thriving while largely unknown in the Grand Rapids community. In retrospect, that was “kind of silly,” said Postma, the school’s director of finance and administration, because the school needs to market itself to recruit new students —even as its reputation for successfully placing its students as interns on movie sets is growing in the film industry.
Compass Film Academy has its roots in Compass Arts, which started in 1997 as a non-profit film and video production company operated by the Hanon McKendry advertising agency, providing non-profit organizations with high-quality marketing and communications productions they could not normally afford. Although the agency no longer operates the academy, Bill McKendry still serves on the nonprofit school’s board of directors, along with well-known politicians Congressman Pete Hoekstra and former State Rep. Bill Huizenga of Holland. Myron (Guy) Sawyer Jr., a business executive in Holland, is chairman of the board.
After training a number of student interns on film production sets in 2000, the Compass Arts management decided that year to start offering a few short-term classes each year in producing and screenwriting, and Compass Film Academy was born.
“In 2006, we began a one-year program,” said Evan Koons, who works as a consultant at the academy, helping students find internships on the set of feature film productions. About 80 students completed the one-year program.
Now the program has expanded to a total of 14 to 15 months, and there are about 26 students in it this year. Postma said students come from all over the U.S.; about half are in-state.
Tuition is almost $27,000 for the Compass program, which Postma said is “an accelerated two-year program.”
The name “compass” refers to direction, which is Christian, according to Postma. Although Koons said applicants are not required to be Christians to be accepted in the Compass program, the school’s fundamental focus is on creative stories which can be produced as films that do not include gratuitous sex and violence.
“The foundation of filmmaking is the ability to tell a good story,” said Cort Langeland, Compass Film Academy’s Executive Producer and Story Instructor. “Cameras, lights, actors and crew cannot overcome a poorly told story. The backbone of our program is built around the ability to tell a great story and empower all the other assets available in filmmaking to succeed in the creation of great films.”
Compass students get hands-on experience in script writing, making and using story boards, scouting locations, composition of shots and shooting, lighting, casting, post-production editing, sound mixing, color correction and special effects.
Graduates of Compass in 2009 won big at the Detroit Independent Film Festival in March, with short films “The Commandant” and “1 New Message,” which took awards for Best Actor and Best Academic Short, respectively.
Former student Jeremy Waterbury, who was the producer on “1 New Message,” worked as an intern at TicTock Studios in Holland on the production of “What’s Wrong with Virginia,” which will be released this year. He has also been working more recently on “The Frontier Boys,” a Grooters Productions film shot in Holland. Koons said Waterbury has been hired as the director’s assistant for the film “30 Minutes or Less,” which is supposed to be shot locally this summer and may star actor Ben Stiller.
Compass offers all of its students the possibility of working on an actual movie set as “legal interns,” in Koons’ words. Movie producers have no problem finding people willing to work for free on a movie set, but that situation can be in conflict with labor laws. Being an unpaid student intern from a vocational school that teaches film production is what the movie people seek. Koons estimates that since January, he had more than 50 contacts with movie people “looking for interns, looking for crew.”
Compass students and former students have worked with producers including Ralph Winter, who made “X-Files Trilogy,” “Wolverine” and “Fantastic Four.” According to a Compass spokesperson, Winter described the school and its students as “impressive.”
One former student, Rachel Dik, completed the short Compass program in 2004 and later ended up working as an entry-level production assistant on the set of “Up in the Air,” the George Clooney feature film that was shot in southeast Michigan and premiered last December.
Compass management said some other television shows and movies that Compass alumni have worked on include “Bella,” “Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius,” “The Chaos Experiment”(filmed in Grand Rapids in 2008), “CSI: Miami.” “Desperate Housewives, “P.S. I Love You,” “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” and “Indiana Jones IV.”
Compass has also provided student interns and employees to 10 West Studios in Manistee, which produced three faith-based Christian films over the past year.
Marsha Fishman, executive director of the Screen Actor Guild’s Detroit branch, said Compass students are “future filmmakers. They’re the real deal.” |