thedrifter
03-26-08, 06:16 AM
Injured service members thrive in San Diego filmmaking program
10:00 PM PDT on Tuesday, March 25, 2008
By JOE VARGO
The Press-Enterprise
SAN DIEGO - A San Diego studio where entertainment wizards manufactured make-believe television worlds has become the real-life training ground where a Marine deafened by a roadside bomb can re-create himself as a sound technician.
It's where other service members left with traumatic brain injuries practice the art of video editing, where Marines with limited use of their arms lug shoulder-mounted cameras into the field.
Life moves quickly at "the School," as the Wounded Marine Careers Foundation in San Diego has been dubbed by its 19 students and instructors. Teachers in the filmmaking academy include Academy Award and Emmy winners and acclaimed movie-industry technicians.
It's an invitation-only program for seriously wounded casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Classes meet every day and don't end until after dark. Getting into the 50-day program requires an interview with instructors and directors as well as the usual applications.
The students are expected to keep up despite agony in their limbs from bullets and shrapnel injuries or medication to control combat-related stress.Sometimes they slip outside to grab an espresso to fight the effects of the powerful pain medications -- including morphine pills and Vicodin -- that most take daily.
Two make it around in wheelchairs, limbs missing from war.
First Graduates
Course work includes everything from interviewing Medal of Honor recipients to videotaping a concert at Camp Pendleton to capturing Marines training at a nearby mockup Iraqi village before returning to combat.
The payoff: a coveted membership in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents workers in motion pictures, television and theater.
Membership is essential to landing the best paying gigs as camera operators, sound mixers, editors, lighting directors and writers. Graduates from the School won't have to pay initial union membership fees, which can reach $2,500, and the union will help them find work.
National union President Thomas Short calls the San Diego program a head start for current and former servicemen bound for new careers.
"We know they will make a substantial contribution to our industry," Short said.
The School's first class graduated Thursday at Stu Segall Productions in San Diego, where the television series "Silk Stalkings" and "Veronica Mars" were taped.
The School formerly served as a prop storage house. Habitat for Humanity volunteers and active-duty Marines spent three months converting it into a classroom, building partitions for individual learning centers, laying electrical cable and installing wheelchair ramps for students with limited mobility.
The graduates included Marine Gunnery Sgt. Nick Popaditch, 40, and Lance Cpl. Michael Passmore, 23, both Twentynine Palms residents before they earned Purple Hearts for combat wounds in Iraq.
Better Listener
Popaditch was a 17-year Marine when his Abrams tank blew up after a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into its turret in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, an attack caught in dramatic fashion by a CNN cameraman, who continued taping as the bloody Popaditch crawled out of the tank.
The attack left him deaf in his right ear, blind in his right eye and with just 8 percent vision in his left. He's learning to become a sound technician, a job that requires him to set up overhead microphones and other audio equipment while working a mixing board to record the right sounds while eliminating background noise. He can't drive anymore and he uses a monocle to get around the job site.
But he's good to go.
He has a glass eye in place of the one he lost in Iraq. It bears the eagle, globe and anchor emblem that symbolizes the Marine Corps.
"The time for feeling sorry for myself is long gone," Popaditch said.
"I'm 40 years old and I am looking at all sorts of possibilities I didn't have a year ago. It's all good. It's kind of like getting a second childhood."
Honoring Bruce Lee
Passmore, who suffered blurred vision from a roadside bomb in Al-Anbar province, said he hopes to take the lessons learned at the School and put them to work on a documentary film.
His subject: martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Passmore said he wants to build the future film around Lee's former student, Jerry Poteet, himself a master of the style Lee created more than 35 years ago.
Passmore sees cash as well as creativity in the filmmaking program.
"It helps me make money," he said.
That attitude suits founders Kev Lombard, and his wife, Judith Paixao just fine.
The pair, both documentary filmmakers, dreamed up the idea of the School after the Marines approached them and asked them to make a film about Leathernecks hurt in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Marines didn't want their wounded to be forgotten. Lombard and Paixao wanted to do more -- to turn the former trigger-pullers into storytellers.
They worked to raise the $3.5 million to run the school, garnering corporate sponsorships from Apple, Adobe, Canon and AbelCine Tech and support from the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, the National Association of Broadcasters and the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund.
Corporate and individual sponsors pick up the tab for the program, which runs between $75,000 and $80,000 per student.
"Being a storyteller is an art," said Lombard, a four-time Emmy winner who moved from Connecticut to San Diego to launch the School. "It heals the person who is telling the story and the person who is listening."
Lombard, 57, said he's amazed at the never-quit attitude exhibited by the Marines-turned-moviemakers.
"I don't complain about aches and pains any more," he said.
Reach Joe Vargo at 951-368-9289 or jvargo@PE.com
The School
LOCATION: Stu Segall Productions Studios, San Diego
CURRICULUM: Video production, writing, editing, sound engineering
STUDENTS: Open to soldiers and Marines wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan
INSTRUCTORS: Include Oscar- and Emmy-winning writers and producers
INAUGURAL GRADUATION: Thursday
GRADUATES: 19
INFORMATION: 858-974-8134 or www.woundedmarinecareers.org
Ellie
10:00 PM PDT on Tuesday, March 25, 2008
By JOE VARGO
The Press-Enterprise
SAN DIEGO - A San Diego studio where entertainment wizards manufactured make-believe television worlds has become the real-life training ground where a Marine deafened by a roadside bomb can re-create himself as a sound technician.
It's where other service members left with traumatic brain injuries practice the art of video editing, where Marines with limited use of their arms lug shoulder-mounted cameras into the field.
Life moves quickly at "the School," as the Wounded Marine Careers Foundation in San Diego has been dubbed by its 19 students and instructors. Teachers in the filmmaking academy include Academy Award and Emmy winners and acclaimed movie-industry technicians.
It's an invitation-only program for seriously wounded casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Classes meet every day and don't end until after dark. Getting into the 50-day program requires an interview with instructors and directors as well as the usual applications.
The students are expected to keep up despite agony in their limbs from bullets and shrapnel injuries or medication to control combat-related stress.Sometimes they slip outside to grab an espresso to fight the effects of the powerful pain medications -- including morphine pills and Vicodin -- that most take daily.
Two make it around in wheelchairs, limbs missing from war.
First Graduates
Course work includes everything from interviewing Medal of Honor recipients to videotaping a concert at Camp Pendleton to capturing Marines training at a nearby mockup Iraqi village before returning to combat.
The payoff: a coveted membership in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents workers in motion pictures, television and theater.
Membership is essential to landing the best paying gigs as camera operators, sound mixers, editors, lighting directors and writers. Graduates from the School won't have to pay initial union membership fees, which can reach $2,500, and the union will help them find work.
National union President Thomas Short calls the San Diego program a head start for current and former servicemen bound for new careers.
"We know they will make a substantial contribution to our industry," Short said.
The School's first class graduated Thursday at Stu Segall Productions in San Diego, where the television series "Silk Stalkings" and "Veronica Mars" were taped.
The School formerly served as a prop storage house. Habitat for Humanity volunteers and active-duty Marines spent three months converting it into a classroom, building partitions for individual learning centers, laying electrical cable and installing wheelchair ramps for students with limited mobility.
The graduates included Marine Gunnery Sgt. Nick Popaditch, 40, and Lance Cpl. Michael Passmore, 23, both Twentynine Palms residents before they earned Purple Hearts for combat wounds in Iraq.
Better Listener
Popaditch was a 17-year Marine when his Abrams tank blew up after a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into its turret in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, an attack caught in dramatic fashion by a CNN cameraman, who continued taping as the bloody Popaditch crawled out of the tank.
The attack left him deaf in his right ear, blind in his right eye and with just 8 percent vision in his left. He's learning to become a sound technician, a job that requires him to set up overhead microphones and other audio equipment while working a mixing board to record the right sounds while eliminating background noise. He can't drive anymore and he uses a monocle to get around the job site.
But he's good to go.
He has a glass eye in place of the one he lost in Iraq. It bears the eagle, globe and anchor emblem that symbolizes the Marine Corps.
"The time for feeling sorry for myself is long gone," Popaditch said.
"I'm 40 years old and I am looking at all sorts of possibilities I didn't have a year ago. It's all good. It's kind of like getting a second childhood."
Honoring Bruce Lee
Passmore, who suffered blurred vision from a roadside bomb in Al-Anbar province, said he hopes to take the lessons learned at the School and put them to work on a documentary film.
His subject: martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Passmore said he wants to build the future film around Lee's former student, Jerry Poteet, himself a master of the style Lee created more than 35 years ago.
Passmore sees cash as well as creativity in the filmmaking program.
"It helps me make money," he said.
That attitude suits founders Kev Lombard, and his wife, Judith Paixao just fine.
The pair, both documentary filmmakers, dreamed up the idea of the School after the Marines approached them and asked them to make a film about Leathernecks hurt in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Marines didn't want their wounded to be forgotten. Lombard and Paixao wanted to do more -- to turn the former trigger-pullers into storytellers.
They worked to raise the $3.5 million to run the school, garnering corporate sponsorships from Apple, Adobe, Canon and AbelCine Tech and support from the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, the National Association of Broadcasters and the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund.
Corporate and individual sponsors pick up the tab for the program, which runs between $75,000 and $80,000 per student.
"Being a storyteller is an art," said Lombard, a four-time Emmy winner who moved from Connecticut to San Diego to launch the School. "It heals the person who is telling the story and the person who is listening."
Lombard, 57, said he's amazed at the never-quit attitude exhibited by the Marines-turned-moviemakers.
"I don't complain about aches and pains any more," he said.
Reach Joe Vargo at 951-368-9289 or jvargo@PE.com
The School
LOCATION: Stu Segall Productions Studios, San Diego
CURRICULUM: Video production, writing, editing, sound engineering
STUDENTS: Open to soldiers and Marines wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan
INSTRUCTORS: Include Oscar- and Emmy-winning writers and producers
INAUGURAL GRADUATION: Thursday
GRADUATES: 19
INFORMATION: 858-974-8134 or www.woundedmarinecareers.org
Ellie