Coffee

“Coffee” came about by accident. I teach a senior capstone course where my students have to create their own animated short film across two semesters. One student said he really wanted to make a film about coffee but was having difficulty coming up with a story. The guy LOVES coffee. After about 15 minutes of everyone in the class trying to help him, the story hit me like a ton of bricks. I had just watched “Blood Diamond” on AMC a few weeks prior. Somehow, the story just fell into place with Leonardo in the back of my head. I vomited the story out to the class and they all loved it. After about a week, the student came back to me and said he really wasn’t feeling the story anymore. I told him that was fine, but that I was going to make it myself one day.

The great thing is “Coffee” is not only funny, but also it had deeper meaning than that. Too often, we as consumers just don’t care where our products come from or how they’re made. We don’t care who it hurts, we just want them to work, to be cheap, or to taste good. Most of us turn a blind eye. “Coffee” is a satirical look at one such product.

“Coffee” was also my first film that I had help creating. Normally, I create everything myself (with the exception of music or certain sounds). This time, I enlisted in the help of some of my students. I wrote an internal grant at my university to get my students paid during the production and thankfully it got accepted (The Undergraduate Research Experience and Creative Activity Summer Teams grant).

From the beginning of June to the end of August, my students and I would come into our computer lab and work 9am-5pm, Monday thru Friday. When school started up in August, I finished the film on my own. At the end of October 2014, the film was finally complete.