You enter a musty-looking building that looks as if it is about to fall down around you and continue down a dark hallway until you see an aged security guard snoozing at his desk. Dread and anticipation fill the air as he wakes up and looks you over. Although it is clearly educational, the program, from Electronic Vision, has made the rounds of the film festivals and was demonstrated at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado and the San Francisco International Film Festival last year. Rajko Grlic, a filmmaker who also holds the title of Eminent Scholar in Film at Ohio University, worked with Tom Erlewine, a program designer at Electronic Vision, to create the software.
Different rooms are devoted to learning about research, screenwriting and pre-production.
The equipment room demonstrates different kinds of lighting, like a key light and fill light. There is also a virtual light meter that the user can position on different parts of the screen to test a variety of camera settings. The story behind the software is almost as interesting as the actual program. The gritty, rambling building used as the interior of the Film School is actually an abandoned 19th-century mental institution near Athens, Ohio. Photographs were taken of the building's rooms and hallways, with the Film School's materials digitally added to the pictures.