Students share what road brought them to CMU

A student-run project through the College of the Arts and Media will tell the story of the different journeys that have brought students to Central Michigan University.

The college will debut CAMEO—CAM Experiential Opportunity—at the college’s awards ceremony on April 28. CAMEO brought together students from the college’s programs to collaborate on the multimedia project.

What is CAMEO? It’s a film project. It’s animation. It’s documentary journalism. It’s art. It’s an expression of the college’s broad identity.

“The tagline for the college has always been, ‘We tell stories in a million ways’,” said Jefferson Campbell, dean of CAM. CAMEO is Campbell’s brainchild. In fact, the prospect of bringing students from a college as eclectic as CAM to one project attracted him to CMU.

It was launched last fall with students from across the college with the idea that they’d create a final product built around the core theme, “All Roads Lead to Central.”

CAMEO might have been Campbell’s inspiration, and he might have thought up the theme, but it was CAM students who conceived what the final project would look like and how to design its path from conception to final product.

“I was asking Steve Coon a million questions,” said Blace Carpenter, a journalism major. “He was like, ‘You tell me. This is your guys’ project’.” Coon, a member of the School of Communication, Journalism, and Media faculty, mentored the students through the project.

Along the way, students would need to learn to collaborate with students from different programs and pick up new skills.

“We’ve all kind of tiptoed into other interest areas in the College of The Arts and Media while working on this project,” Carpenter said. “We haven’t been just journalism, just animation, just broadcasting. We’ve all got to experience a little bit of everything.”

Students led the experience from the brainstorming to execution to final production, Blace said.

Putting students in the driver’s seat provides a perfect environment where they can experiment and learn from mistakes along the way, Campbell said.

The plot centers on a fictional student assigned a class project to learn what brings students to CMU. The story of CMU’s community starts with a theater student doing a bit of acting.

“It’s this actress, she’s working through a school project … she needs to interview people about why they came to CMU,” said Sarah Kelly, a broadcasting major and one of the student producers. “So, it’s this fictional video of her working through this.”

CAMEO students surveyed and interviewed fellow students from across campus about what brought them to CMU. Then they picked which ones to highlight.

Some were interviewed on camera. Some stories are told by animated dream sequences.

“She falls asleep because she has to go through so many interviews to figure out this question she’s been given,” said Fiona Ambrose, a CAMEO student studying communication. “And when she falls asleep, she’s still playing the interviews.”

The dream sequence interviews created a challenge to the two animation students working on the project.

“I think one of our biggest problems is the two animators … we are not the same kind of animator,” said Zoey Lawrence, an animation student. “She’s a stop-motion animator and I’m digital only, so we had to find a way to not only be able to help each other out but collaborate in a way that made sense to everyone in the group.”

Providing participating students with an experience that allowed them to work with different majors they might not get to work with was intentional and has post-graduation benefits, Campbell said.

One of his inspirations for CAMEO was a visit he paid to a CAM alumnus working for Fox Sports, he said. The alumni’s team included people with a wide range of expertise—writers, graphic designers, photographers—to create a modern multimedia team.

He said he’d like to make it a permanent program.

Kelly said she also developed critical skills beyond just those of working with other disciplines.

“It gave me a lot of confidence, especially as a leader and working with others,” she said. “You can work on a class project for a couple of weeks, but we’ve been working on this group project for like the entire year.

“I don’t think I have any other experience that can compare to this. I’ve just learned so much about leadership and teamwork, plus the added skills, that can make my resume as solid as concrete.”