MSU MFA Program In Science & Natural History Filmmaking
Montana State University’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Science & Natural History Filmmaking (SNHF), founded in 2000, continues to be the only MFA program of its kind in the world. Its mission is to take students with backgrounds in science, engineering, and technology and prepare them as filmmakers with the creative and critical skills necessary to produce work that contributes to the public understanding of science. Students in the program come from a wide variety of backgrounds including the physical sciences, the social sciences, engineering, technology, medicine, and law.
The SNHF Program is part of Montana State University’s School of Film and Photography, which also offers undergraduate degrees in filmmaking and photography.
The program trains directors and producers who are familiar with all parts of the movie-making process. Students in the SNHF Program produce works that range from documentary to experimental. Many of these student films have received festival awards, while others have been broadcast in many major venues such as PBS, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, The Science Channel, CNN, 60 Minutes II, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News. The students have produced films for the National Park Service, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and such non-profit organizations including the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, and the Nature Conservancy. Student work from the SNHF Program has appeared in major museums, schools, and cultural venues.
Each year, SNHF student films are screened at the Element Film Festival in Bozeman, Montana.
Read more about MSU MFA Program In Science & Natural History Filmmaking: Selected Awards and Festival Screenings
Famous quotes containing the words program, science, natural, history and/or filmmaking:
“Mormon colonization south of this point in early times was characterized as “going over the Rim,” and in colloquial usage the same phrase came to connote violent death.”
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.”
—Jacques Attali (b. 1943)
“A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless—and absolutely essential.”
—William Goldman (b. 1931)