Monday, Oct. 26, 2009

Art Institute now part of fabric of Charleston

A little more than two years ago, Education Management Corp. opened an Art Institute in Charleston with a modest 59 students in a place decidedly different from the big cities where it historically takes root.

Acclaimed culinary school Johnson & Wales University had packed up for Charlotte in 2006, and Charleston Mayor Joe Riley personally recruited Art Institute, an Atlanta-based network that now includes more than 40 campuses across North America.

Riley helped the Art Institute score a competitive lease at the Carroll Building right at the foot of Market Street and, when it launched in April 2007, he told its officers that they would soon outgrow the space.

Fast-forward to this month, as the Art Institute approaches a 700-member student body and just opened its first satellite office.

Students in the photographic imaging program or the institute's newest track, digital filmmaking and video production, learn their craft right next door to the biggest movie screen in town at the Terrace Hippodrome.

With its exposed brick and beam and low-hanging lights, the new classrooms carry a chic, industrial feel. The top-of-the-line equipment inside them serves as a testament to the Art Institute's speedy positioning into the fabric of Charleston.

CHANGING SETS

High up in the Carroll Building, looking over the aging brick of the City Market and out to the ornate columns of the Customhouse, classrooms play out like a movie reel.

In one, students sit before easels, their eyes fixed upon a live model. A few rooms down, a different group fills desks behind a well-dressed mannequin as an instructor teaches from an overhead projector. And around the bend in the hallway, aspiring chefs in their telltale white toques whisk a green concoction in steel mixing bowls.

The missing frames from the movie reel inside the Art Institute's main campus are its film and photo students. Home base used to be a classroom with few extravagancies beyond 10 desks and editing software.

"They had a lot of faith in the school, because we had nothing to show back then," said Paige Crone, the school's public relations director.

They are the five photography instructors with 85 students and four film instructors with 28 students. And today they have 6,700 square feet at Fountain Walk on Charleston Harbor all to themselves.

They also have top-of-the-line digital cameras with $15,000 backs on them that can print large images. They have a digital dark room with 20 computers and a printer for every two students.

And then there's the pristine film studio, the one that would make television professionals drool. Two new studio cameras, a control room with an impossible number of buttons and a sound booth that could double as a recording studio. The equipment in the studio and sound booth alone totals about $400,000.

Almost all Art Institute students, 90 percent, come from within South Carolina, and half of those hail from within 100 miles of Charleston, according to the school's president, Rick Jerue. The average student is about 22, a little older than the average college kid, he said. Tuition costs $24,000 a year.

Representatives for the Art Institutes system plan to visit every high school in the state this year to spread the word about their growing brand of education. Jerue said the local school intends to expand even further.

The new film and photography school marks a first step in that direction.

PICTURE THIS

Department chairman Howard Katz previously taught at Trident Technical College, where he helped develop a crew base to handle the technical aspects of films: lighting, gear, etc. What Charleston lacked, he knew, was the creative side.

He hopes, with this new film track, to develop a creative crew base that won't wait for the whims of a Hollywood production.

"The idea was, 'Let's train people to be creative and do their own projects,'" Katz said.

He sees this place as Charleston's answer to the Savannah College of Art and Design, the prestigious arts school just down the river. He said the Lifetime series "Army Wives" proves that Charleston can successfully sustain an entire production.

Katz tries to keep his students ahead of industry trends and, seeing the blurring line between industries, he tells film students to take photography and Web design classes as electives.

He sets them up with cameras that let them edit while filming and recounts the now-legendary tale that Peter Jackson stood before rows of monitors and directed the entire "Lord of the Rings" trilogy simultaneously.

The logic holds that if the Art Institute can grow student talent, perhaps industry will follow. And that, in turn, means jobs for graduates.

While Riley courted the Art Institute as a replacement for Johnson & Wales, he sees the school now as the perfect complement to Trident Tech's film offerings.

"Charleston is such a visual, picturesque, textural place," he said. "We always thought filmmaking was a natural here."

The Art Institute aims to partner with its neighbor with the 74-foot movie screen. And the school works with every group lobbying for creative industry growth.

Jerue, who left a position as a corporate vice president with Education Management Corp. to come here, said someone can understand Charleston's arts scene best by taking an art walk. You might stroll past traditional paintings on Broad Street or bump into the cutting-edge designs on upper King Street.

"Charleston is at an interesting point in its development," Jerue said. "It's viewed as a wonderful historical history, now a culinary capital of the Southeast. ... I think it has the potential to be the creative capital."

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