Photo, Film, & Studio Arts
Photography
Photography at St. Andrew's welcomes both the novice and the expert. Courses are housed in the O'Brien Arts Center's Barbour Photography Suite, alongside a state-of-the-art graphic arts lab. At every level, students will:
- develop film in a wet black-and-white lab
- study historical and contemporary photography alongside hands-on practice
- take part in three student art exhibitions each year in the Warner Gallery—including the work of preparing the show itself
Students who complete introductory coursework can select a photography major senior year. Majors take a full-credit Advanced Study course requiring extensive independent work outside the classroom, building toward an individual portfolio of ambitious, original photography.
Studio Art
Studio art at St. Andrew's covers drawing, painting, and multimedia, for students at every level of experience. Students who complete introductory coursework in drawing and painting can go major in studio art senior year. Majors take a full-credit Advanced Study course requiring extensive independent work and artistic production outside the classroom, building toward an individual portfolio of ambitious, original work.
In every fine arts discipline, students start with the core elements of that discipline's visual language, working through exercises built to give them real fluency. We believe any student can reach that goal, regardless of prior experience or natural talent. Once students know the building blocks, we push them toward technical mastery—and toward experimenting outside their comfort zone. Each course gets progressively more challenging, with room for individual interpretation, so beginners and experienced artists alike find a pace that stretches them.
Art history is a core part of our studio arts curriculum, too. We ask arts students to engage constantly with images and art from other cultures, and to understand the historical context each style or art form grew out of.
The O'Brien Arts Center
The O'Brien Arts Center is home to the Warner Gallery, which holds student exhibitions and features visiting artists. Our visiting artists visit classrooms, offering artists-in-the-making a chance to interact with professionals, working makers and to witness how the artistic disciplines we teach in our classrooms can be pursued in the wider world. When combined with close contact with established St. Andrew's faculty artists who are continually pursuing their own artistic practices, our intensive visual arts training allows students to grow in artistic understanding, creative capabilities, and free expression. Our master-apprentice teaching model allows our students to gain a strong sense of the arts as a means for investigating and celebrating the world.
Film
The St. Andrew's Film Studies program is designed to give students the opportunity to study and create film projects through practice and repetition of the fundamental principles and skills of filmmaking. Film studies courses present the students with the necessary ingredients for the creation and understanding of compelling works of film and video, and also explore current events in the film business and the forces that affect the creation and distribution of films and television programs.
Students who complete introductory and intermediate coursework in film studies may choose to further their study by taking the AS Studio Film Major class in their senior year; this is a full-credit Advanced Study course in which students work on multiple projects from conception to delivery, and refine their screenwriting, cinematography, production, editing, and sound techniques in a holistic format. Also available for seniors are spring semester tutorials on topics such as original screenwriting and the origins and influences of the Film Noir movement.
All projects are shot on DSLR and Blackmagic Design digital film cameras and are composited, mixed, and edited in our state-of-the-art graphic arts lab using Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, and DaVinci Resolve. Film studies students exhibit their film projects throughout the year at our student exhibitions and at our annual Arts Weekend Film Festival in the spring semester.
Our program goal is to inspire our students with the power of the moving image and to inform them about the influence of media in our society. In many years film studies students have gone on to study film at the university level at schools like NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Emerson College, USC, and Loyola-Marymount.