More than two dozen students and recent grads of the Filmmaking program here at Mason Gross collaborated with Oscar-winning documentarian and professor Thomas F. Lennon over three years to create The Retreat, a documentary detailing the real-world effects of rising sea levels.
The 10-minute documentary, which Lennon, also head of the school’s Documentary Film Lab, directed and produced, focuses on the Rutgers University Marine Field Station, a facility of the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences within the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. The station, which serves as a working lab where graduate- and postdoctoral-level research is conducted year-round (the space is occupied by researchers about 69 hours a week on average), sits across from the Little Egg Inlet in the Mullica River-Great Bay estuary.
The central dilemma: Do the Marine Field Station scientists move inland given that the station is vulnerable to rising flood waters?
When it came to interviewing the scientists, Lennon said he and his film crew had to figure out “how to draw out the best from them, and how to help mediate and translate the language of science into the language of film.”
He said, “Science, which is all about precision, and film, which is all about emotion and impression, and making all that work – that was the challenge, and I wanted the students to really feel that and be tested by that challenge.”
Giving students projects that grapple with real-world issues is crucial, Lennon says.
“You can think of the Documentary Film Lab as something of a bridge between school and the world of work,” he says. “But filmmaking is really time consuming, the film major is very intensive, and students are hard to book. So, we moved slowly, but I’m proud to say that the entire film was shot by students – the sound recording, too.”
Lennon added, “Giving students opportunity – that’s our job.”
Excerpted from an article by Mike Lucas. Read more about The Retreat and the Marine Field Station on Rutgers Today.
Image credit: Recent alum Kim Hansen films on location near the station in Tuckerton, NJ.
Watch The Retreat:
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