Palmer grad to attend prestigious film school

PALMER — If you ask Jessica Cole to explain to you what production design is, and why she loves it, hope you’re sitting in a comfortable chair, because you will be there for a while.

A graduate of Palmer High School, Cole recently received her degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas with a double major in film and art. However, that diploma title does very little to explain what she does, and what she plans to do.

“You’re basically the person who is in charge of the look of a film,” she explained.

This means that if you are on set of a movie about the Civil War, for instance, you have to make sure the entire film embodies the correct look and feel of the time period. Close attention to detail in location, props, costumes and set is vital. The person in charge of this must be a jack of all trades.

It all might seem somewhat straightforward, but according to Cole, there is no precise definition of what production design is. There really was no degree for it, either. Film and art was the closest she could get.

“I’ve basically decided that what I do, I do production design, with a skill set of practical effects,” said Cole, who is also interested in animatronics.

After graduating from SMU, Cole applied to, and got turned down by several grad schools and then decided that she would try and make it on her own without further education.

“That lasted all of two weeks, and then I found out I was accepted to the American Film Institute in California,” she said.

AFI, located in Los Angeles, is one of the top film schools in the nation, and only 14 people are accepted into production design every year, which is one of their six programs. Cole was on the alternate list going into the school, a fact that makes her more determined to excel.

“I intend every day to never make them question the fact that they accepted me to that school,” she said, “The race is against myself. I want to be the very best I can be, every day I want to be a little better than I was yesterday.”

Cole believes she has always been a storyteller. She first experienced the medium of film in middle school where her first project starred sock puppet characters. Then she moved onto high school, and when she was not allowed to enroll in the two-semester film class during her freshman year, she took to the library to read the entire textbook for the class cover to cover.

When she finally did take the class, she found that the scripts she wrote were slightly unique to the rest of her classmates; while the other kids were writing about love triangles and war, Cole was thinking outside the box.

“A lot of my stories tend to be realistic but with a twist. Kind of Twilight Zone-esque,” she said.

Film was not Cole’s only creative outlet. She was also involved in ballet, jazz band, Alaska Children’s Choir and the VPA in productions such as “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Anne of Green Gables” when she was very young. Her favorite part was always the props and the set breaking at the end of the play.

The turning point that truly piqued her interest in a combination of production design and animatronics was in her freshman year of high school at the theatrical show “Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular” held at the Sullivan Arena.

“It’s literally life-size dinosaurs walking around on a stage. I was just completely floored,” she said. “They’re animatronics. It’s basically an extreme form of puppetry.”

Controllers called ‘voodoo puppeteers’ move the animals on stage from behind the audience.

Almost eight years later, in her last year of college, Cole had the chance to meet and interview Philip Millar, the creative director for Creature Technologies, the company who designed “Walking with Dinosaurs.”

“So I actually got to meet the man who was part of the vision behind the show that got me started in the first place,” she said. “That was incredible.”

Cole also worked for a month with Rick Lazzarini, founder of the Animatronics Institute in California, and ended up building her first animatronic; a woodpecker head.

Part of the reason she moved down to Texas for college was to be with her 96-year-old grandmother, who was suffering from dementia. While at her grandmother’s house, Cole found a box full of love letters that her grandfather, whom she had never met, had written to her grandmother during their courtship in the 1930s. These letters inspired Cole’s thesis project at SMU, which was a short film about the relationship between a girl and her grandmother. The girl in the film also finds a box of love letters, and whenever her and her grandmother read the letters, it transports them back in time.

“She wasn’t a story teller herself, and when the dementia came in, she really couldn’t tell those stories about her life, even her husband — my grandfather,” she said, “So I’m hearing my 20-year-old grandfather just spew up his heart to my grandmother.”

Cole is continually inspired from the experiences of her older family members such as her aunt, a hippie who lived in LA, and her grandfather who fought in World War II. She believes God gave her a love of learning the stories of other people.

“I meet people, and it’s like, ‘you have a story, you have something to give, a story to tell,’” she said. “That’s part of praising the beauty of God’s creation. People are so diverse and so unique. I just think that’s cool.”

School starts for Cole on Aug. 21. While at AFI, she will be undergoing an intensive two-year program. She worries mostly about living in cramped LA for so long after growing up as a small-town girl in Palmer, but she also struggles with the feeling that her skill might not measure up to that of her fellow students.

“I was reading [about] some second-year people, who are going to be my mentors. One guy is from Harvard, this one girl has already done Fashion Week 2016, or she had an exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum, and I’m sitting there going, ‘I made a woodpecker!’” she laughed.

After AFI, Cole is not sure she will be able to move back to Alaska permanently, but says the state will always be part of who she is. Her family is building a cabin on the Glenn Highway, an oasis she says she will never give up.

“Alaska’s never going to be completely out of the picture, but unless there’s an opportunity, I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back and be here,” she said.

Katie Stark is a Frontiersman summer intern.