Student takes film into the digital future

It's not everyday you meet an up-and-coming movie director. But if you're a Penn student, you may be surprised to know there is one living among you. This winter, Engineering senior Neil Chatterjee will become one of the first people in the world to complete a full-length digital movie. His film, entitled Wired Awake, chronicles a Penn student suffering from insomnia who enters an experiment to help him sleep. He begins experiencing dreams for the first time, and the film is about the repercussions of those dreams. Chatterjee, who worked on the project with a high school friend, shot most of the film in Boston and a few scenes around Penn's campus. The actors were amateurs, the budget small and the equipment minimal. As the movie's Web site, http://www.wiredawake.com, states, the project was "a true labor of love." "It alternatingly felt really good and really bad. Sometimes it felt like I was doing something really special, and the other half of the time I felt like I was deluding myself.... It was a big emotional risk," Chatterjee said. With 90 percent of the work behind him, Chatterjee is currently involved in editing the dream sequences and adding sound to the film. He hopes to present a screening of the film on campus sometime in the spring. "In the big picture, I'm going to try to go to film festivals -- that's my goal, film festivals and contests and stuff like that. I don't know if it has any merit to get noticed in that way, but there's no harm in trying," Chatterjee said. Chatterjee transferred into the Engineering School two years ago, right around the time that the deans of the Engineering, Fine Arts and Annenberg schools were finalizing plans on a new interdisciplinary major: digital media design. The program, which admits only 20 students per year, brings together each of the three mediums for students interested in graphic design, computer animation and other forms of special effects. "There's sort of a rift between the technical people and the artists" in the entertainment industry, Chatterjee said. "And this was a program created to try to bridge that gap." The program is not just about taking courses in Fine Arts, Engineering and Communications. It is about mastering a new, cutting-edge technology likely to one day surpass Digital Video Disk and other technology. Currently, there are two classes of digital-based movies: computer animation, as was used in Toy Story, and regular film shot on digital video, as in The Blair Witch Project -- the 1999 movie that shot two obscure filmmakers to stardom. One of the advantages of digital films is that it tends to be very cheap to produce. "What we're trying to do," Chatterjee explained, "is kind of go halfway in between so that the movie has a lot of things that we shot in real life -- but on digital film because it's cheap --but then there are also a lot of computer generated elements." The dream sequences, perhaps not surprisingly, provide the bulk of this computer-generated component. Most of the film's $5,000 budget came from Chatterjee's pocket, but when he ran out of money he secured the remaining funds from University Scholars. Still, Chatterjee pointed out, "On most Hollywood sets that will buy you about 15 minutes of production time." Annenberg Professor Paul Messaris, who teaches a course entitled "Visual Communications Laboratory," has worked with Chatterjee on another digital movie for the class and has no doubt Chatterjee will achieve great success. "He is one of the most intelligent students I've ever worked with -- he's really, really brilliant, Messaris said. "He's just brimming with ideas... and he's someone who's going to be a very creative person in the future."