MDOCS Celebrates First Graduating Class

As MDOCS closes out its fourth year, the difficult task of saying good bye to students who started taking courses, attending events, and developing projects in 2014-215, the first year for them and for the program. Not only will we miss these faces in our classes, office, and DOCLab. As they head into internships, jobs and adventures beyond the college, these graduates take with them the experience and institutional memory of what MDOCS was like in the very beginning. These students' interests, passions and skills have shaped the direction the program took in many areas as courses and workshops were developed for the first time and even on-the-fly. Although students  come through and interact with the program from many different gateways, and bring their passions back to the majors and minors they find, one thing is clear :  for a committed crew, their time at Skidmore would not have been the same without MDOCS. Here, five students tell a few of the stories of how MDOCS changed their paths and the way they navigated their college experience and professional aspirations.

Caleb Weiss (Documentary Studies)

Caleb came to Skidmore with a strong interest in film, but it wasn't until MDOCS was established in his first year that he knew he wanted to pursue documentary. As the first and (so far) only self-determined major in Documentary Studies, Caleb and MDOCS Director Jordana Dym created a path utilizing courses from across the campus to flesh out a program of study to supply Caleb not just with the production skills he sought, but the ethics, theory and research methods that are vital to documentary practice.  Sound, photography, and video production, editing, and presentation were core skills built, with content and storytelling expertise built through classes in English, Sociology, and Media and Film Studies, as well as working as a videographer in the college's Communications office.

"My capstone is a 10-min ethnographic film ["DIY"] about “do it yourself” musicians and the rise of Soundcloud and synthesized music and that culture within a college setting. What I’ve been doing is conducting a number of interviews filming a lot of performances within Saratoga and within Skidmore and it’s given me a good platform to be able to do what I love which is cinematography. It’s really the best of both worlds because I get to learn about a culture that I didn’t really know about before, but also do something that I love.” – Caleb Weiss

 

Emily Rizzo (English)

Emily was hooked from year one. She took her first MDOCS class (Principles of Doc with Prof. Dym) as a freshman and loved it. Emily has participated in every aspect of the program through courses, working at DOCLab, and participating in the Storytellers' Institute. She was the student assistant of the first annual Storytellers' Institute in 2015, was selected as a Student Fellow in the 2016 Institute, and will be returning again this June to work on a project with a community partner of MDOCS and 2016  Visiting Fellow, filmmaker Aggie Bazaz. In many ways documentary has ngrained itself in her studies, extending the voice she honed as a writer in English and communicator in Intergroup Releations. Emily attributes her conscientious directorial decisions to her lessons learned in Doc Studies courses. She has injected her personal stories into her documentary work which reveals her growth and journey as a person over the past four years in an intimate and revealing way that takes bravery.

Emily's capstone project, A White Girls Walks Into A Shebeen was no exception - “I’m making a documentary film for my senior project as an English major and this is a personal documentary film about my experience with abortion and also stand-up comedy. I wanted to make the film because I felt like I needed it for myself and I felt like my perspective wasn’t being represented enough or [at least] I didn’t see it.

 

Maryam DeWitt (Social Work)

“The first time we edited the work captured in New York City, I was like ‘wait, whet?’ we just created a single story from multiple voices. I began noticing this deep interest in media, so I did what any insane person would do, I ran towards it and kept poking at it until I found what worked for me.” - Maryam DeWitt (excerpt taken from LINE Magazine)

Maryam attributes her initial connection with the MDOCS program to a trip to New York City called DocuTrek - a week-long excursion where students had the opportunity to create a short documentary film in a week. From there she hit the ground running, taking as many classes as she could fit and participating in both the 2015 and 2016 Storytellers' Institutes. Her work culminated into one final project that she presented at the Tang Teaching Museum entitled, "The Miseducation of the Black Womyn," a medley of performance, film, exhibit and social activism. Maryam has the ability to see a distinct vision, and then doggedly pursue it until it comes to life. Her final piece is still going through the post-production phase and will likely be seen beyond the Skidmore campus in the coming year.

"MDOCS has provided me with the tools, the support, and numerous opportunities to fully express myself both creatively and academically. It has made my major make sense. While it may seem limiting it is the exact opposite; it welcomes all disciplines and allows them to flourish thought different avenues of media. MDOCS has contributed to my personhood and confidence, for I am not the best writer or public speaker, but it gave me software like Adobe Premier where I created sentences through edits, it gave me gear to create silent and auditory images. Through MDOCS I have connected with a host of individuals that I would have never held a conversation with. It builds community and family.” – Maryam DeWitt

 

Eleanor Green (Studio Art)

Eleanor took Video Production in her first year at Skidmore and fell in love with film and video. She continued on to major in Studio Art and continued to come back to MDOCS and incorporate her design and video skills into her own and friends' projects. In many ways, she became the animator-in-residence in the DOCLab space, as well as creating posters that animated and told the story of DOCLab events.  She shared her talents by leading the DocLab workshop in poster design and in-class workshops that helped students across the curriculum incorporate these skills into their assignments. In 2016 Eleanor pursued a personal documentary film about her family history as a Storytellers' Institute student fellow and returned again in 2017 as the student assistant. In her senior year Eleanor closed the loop by acting as the Peer Mentor of the Video Production course - the one that introduced her to MDOCS four years prior.

Eleanor credits MDOCS for the real world experiences the faculty and courses supplied - from knowing how to conduct in an interview to engaging with creative professionals. “The MDOCS department as a whole is like a close-knit family. It’s one of the smaller departments on campus, but it has so much to offer and I feel like there’s much more of a sense of community between the professors in the MDOCS department than there are in other departments. Working behind-the-scenes in the Storytellers’ Institute as well as being a part of it, I kind of got to see that and I feel like a part of the team.” - Eleanor Green

 

Urvi Kalra (Environmental Studies)

Urvi came to MDOCS during its first semester in the Fall of 2014, enrolling in the first offering of Prof. Dym's Principles of Documentary course along with many other students who would come to be 'MDOCS regulars.' She stayed connected with the program first as the student assistant to the 2016 Storytellers' Institute, supporting the many people that come through campus to interface with the program and its offerings during the month of June. From there, she continued to pursue analysis and creation of media in her Environmental Studies major, interning with the Saratoga Film Academy, UNICEF, and helping to develop a short documentary film for the Saratoga City Council about sustainable transportation.  As a student assistant in the MDOCS 'HQ'or home office, she excelled in assignments ranging from photographing MDOCS events to conducting interviews with visiting makers.

"When I was exposed to MDOCS and all the things you can do with documentary because they brought in so many speakers and different workshops, I realized how I can connect the environment to the medium of film and how powerful it can be. Every internship of mine since then has been connecting communication and marketing and using digital media and digital tools to spread awareness about international development, or climate change."- Urvi Kalra

Although Urvi never took another Documentary Studies course, she decided to incorporate the skills and methods learned in this combination of experiences into her final capstone project for Environmental Studies. Her film entitled, "Who Will Save the World?" explores the different ways in which people perceive climate change and what they're doing in their daily lives to change it. Watch 20-min film here.

After graduation, Urvi will continue her work in sustainable development through the Princeton in Africa Fellowship Program where she was offered the position of the Commications Fellow at The BOMA Project in Nanyuki, Kenya. “I am now going to create my own productions when I’m in Kenya through a fellowship and I think MDOCS has empowered me and given me the tools to become somebody who can say, ‘Yes, I can do this. Give me the resources and I will find my way and make this happen and tell a story that’s effective.’” - Urvi Kalra