University of Hawaii offers new creative outlet

The Academy for Creative Media Facility at the University of Hawaii West Oahu was planning to open its recently completed, 33,000-square-foot, high-tech building to students when the novel corona­virus outbreak caused the entire UH system to halt on-site instruction.

Now, like a palace frozen under a spell in a fairy tale, it awaits young people to bring it to life. UH campuses are currently scheduled to reopen in the fall, UH West Oahu Chancellor Maenette Benham said.

“There’s nothing on the mainland kids can’t have here now,” said Chris Lee, a former president of production at Columbia/Tristar Pictures who graduated from ‘Iolani School and Yale University and spent 27 years on the mainland before moving home to the islands, where he founded the Academy for Creative Media system at UH, launching it with the film school at UH Manoa in 2003.

“Everything in here is industry standard and runs the gamut from a traditional film curriculum to evolving, transmedia content and distribution platforms,” he said, adding he envisions the West Oahu building as the hub of the ACM network.

Because it’s in West Oahu, Lee said, the building will advance ACM’s mission to educate local youth from diverse backgrounds, particularly those from underserved communities, so they won’t feel they have to either move to the mainland or dial back their dreams. He said the Roy and Hilda Takeyama Family Foundation has donated more than $1 million through the UH Foundation toward scholarships at UHWO ACM and for programmatic purposes at the facility.

Benham said UH West Oahu began offering a Bachelor of Arts degree in humanities with a concentration in creative media in 2014, and today creative media is the fastest-growing major on campus, with Native Hawaiians making up 28% of the student body in its ACM program.

Gabriel Navalta, a native of Laupahoehoe, Hawaii island, said ACM had broadened his horizons. He had been studying videography and computer science at Hawaii Community College in Hilo, and not planning for more than a two-year associate’s degree, when at a college fair he learned UH West Oahu was offering its ACM degree program online “so folks on other islands could take advantage.”

Excited at the chance to earn a bachelor’s degree without leaving his Big Island community, he applied, was accepted and enrolled as a distance-learning student in the fall of 2019.

On his first visit to the campus, in February, Navalta found himself “enthralled” by the ACM building, with its “big-screen theater where you not only hear the sound, you can feel it, too, and a room with boards on the ground made of different materials that create different-sounding footsteps.”

He decided to move to Oahu and attend ACM in person in the fall.

With a buoyant smile, Lee led a recent tour of the soaring, barnlike building, its sleek, clean lines descending to either side of a high, peaked roof, its banks of windows filled with views of the Waianae mountains and Kapolei plains.

Highlights included a 100-seat Dolby Atmos movie theater with film editing and sound-mixing equipment, which is “probably the best theater in Hawaii right now,” Lee said. Also in the building is a gymnasium-size, traditional Hollywood soundstage, “the biggest in Hawaii,” for shooting scenes on sets designed and built by students and rolled in through “elephant doors.” There also is a central, day-lit e-sports arena with a big screen, and an emerging media room whose walls, ceiling and floor serve as screens for projecting interactive, 3D videos.

In addition to bleachers and a giant screen, the vaulted, two-story-high, glass-walled e-sports arena, known as the lobby, also sports pods of brightly colored, modular furniture in playful, wavy shapes intended to appeal to “the Skittles generation,” Lee said.

“It’s so Google-ish, isn’t it?” he added. “It’s got that tech company vibe.”

Lee said he had taken the building’s design and planning groups to visit Google and YouTube headquarters as well as the Lucas Facility at the University of Southern California and the media schools of Chapman and Emerson colleges, as well as ‘Iolani’s Sullivan Center and Searider Productions at Waianae High School on Oahu.

As he led visitors through the soundproofed, screen- arrayed honeycomb of a building, Lee pointed out empty cable holes in the walls that awaited yet-to-be-invented next generations of wiring, and overhead light fixtures shaped like openwork lanterns, designed to absorb excess sound. It was easy to imagine a buzzing hive of collaborative activity when students and faculty finally arrived. For now a few technicians worked on maintaining equipment, and in a large, open but divisible classroom, senior Brandon Santos updated Mac systems for student use.

In the emerging media room, Kari Noe, a graduate student in computer science, worked at her screen adding details to a virtual Hawaiian forest, projected on its walls and floor, that was created with software she helped design.

The room was designed “more so as immersion than as 3D holograph,” said Noe, who graduated from ACM at UH Manoa with an animation major. “If we project water on the floor, we can animate it so it ripples as you step.”

Today she was adding tiles imprinted with words from Hawaiian and other Pacific languages that could be touched to make additions to the scene. Touching the tiles with characters for “iiwi singing” added a lively, red iiwi songbird to the forest.

It felt like entering the green world of “Avatar” in 3D but without needing goggles, this time.

But perhaps the most exciting space, Lee said, was a comparatively traditional­-looking coworking room off the day-lit landing of the second floor.

“I’m especially proud of this space, where multiple companies can (gather) at the same time.” he said. “People can start companies and meet here with their staff, do mentorships with current students — we really want to instill an entrepreneurial spirit.”

“Our program encompasses all forms of mediums,” said ACM West Oahu program director Sharla Hanaoka, giving a rundown of course offerings in digital art, graphic design, web design, mobile app design, game development, writing, video production, animation, social media and web development as well as classes in leadership, creative writing and history.

“Technology changes, but how to tell a story and think outside the box are perennial skills our graduates need,” Hanaoka said.

Ashley Guzman, a 2017 graduate of UH West Oahu, said ACM prepared her well for her job as assistant to “Magnum P.I.” executive producer Craig Cannold.

“I took a variety of courses: humanities, mobile games app design, sound design,” she said, adding she had a lucky break when her student short film, “A Love Letter to the Ocean,” was shown at a Regal theater in Kapolei after winning a competition set up by ACM in partnership with the company.

“I realized I had to get into the filmmaking business,” Guzman said.

Thanks to the collaborative culture at ACM, she said, she’s able to communicate with a wide variety of people in her job and “be part of a team bouncing ideas off one another constantly, in order to create the best story in the end.”

While some graduates of ACM’s 10-campus network start companies and give back by hiring alumni, others return to teach, like Melissa Lochman, a Molokai native who graduated from ACM West Oahu in 2015 and now teaches Intro to Digital Art there.

Navalta said that after getting his degree he hopes to move home and teach creative media on the Big Island.

From the lobby, Lee led visitors out glass doors to see an enormous, open-air, mixing-stage screen with amphitheater seating reminiscent of the Waikiki Shell.

Filmmaking had come a long way, he said, since he got hooked as a youngster when his father brought home a Super 8 movie camera.

While the building was designed to be as “agile, nimble and future-proof as possible,” Lee said, it also sits well on the land, conveying roots in island history, tradition and the surrounding countryside.

On the Net

For more information:

>> Visit acmsystem.hawaii.edu.

Green building

Designed to support multiplatform transmedia productions using current and future technology, the Creative Media Facility at UH West Oahu is securing its investment with energy- and water-saving systems, including:

>> A 100-kilowatt rooftop photovoltaic system to reduce the building’s electricity costs.

>> To take advantage of natural daylight without direct sunlight, a majority of classroom and meeting spaces are positioned along the building’s north side.

>> Interior lights are programmed with occupancy sensors that automatically shut off when no motion is detected in the room.

>> Each classroom has at least one operable window to provide some degree of natural ventilation in the event of power loss.

>> All classroom windows are outfitted with roller shades for daylight and temperature control.

>> Rainwater management and landscaping.

>> An infiltration swale system that naturally filters stormwater and eliminates pollutant discharge into the campus’ storm drain system.

>> Fire lanes constructed with grassblock to provide permeable surfaces to minimize stormwater runoff.