Lillian Landberg

From playing extras in an advertisement to having a DJ party in the cafeteria, Interactive Media is a class like no other, where students do everything from filming and editing videos to playing music in virtual reality. 

In room 127B, Mounds View teacher Rebecca Allard teaches the semester-long Interactive Media class. When she first came to Mounds View, she saw that Photoshop and Web Design classes were the only media classes available. Drawing from her previous multimedia teaching experiences and eager to expand opportunities for students, Allard soon put in a course request for Interactive Media, and it was added to the Mounds View curriculum in the 2018-2019 academic year. 

Being an elective class, Allard has the freedom to design the curriculum herself while seeking feedback from students, industry experts and college professors. Throughout the course, students learn animation, video production, audio production and virtual reality. They then have to show Allard that they can do a certain skill through a choice project.

Allard puts a big emphasis on tailoring the course to student interest. For example, if students are more interested in video editing, then she will cater the curriculum to support those interests. She also gives students the flexibility to choose their own path with each project. “If you want to do music production, but you’re not comfortable doing DJing, and that’s not your jam, cool, then you could do this song that’s already made, and you could rip it apart and kind of edit it the way that you want or you could make something from start to scratch,” said Allard.  

Through this course, Allard hopes to give students a taste of the media industry by inviting speakers and providing field trip opportunities. “I’m not an expert. So, I use a lot of industry speakers, industry partnerships, industry connections. We have some rockstar people that have worked with us, whether it’s animators, concept artists or special effects,” said Allard. 

One industry expert who came was TV Director and Minnesota native Kat Rafael, who invited Interactive Media students to be a part of a commercial she shot for the healthcare company Tria. While playing extras in a hockey stadium, students saw how the skills they learned were applied in the professional world. “They could see how they did the lighting setups. They could see the various types of cameras. We’d talked about camera angles and then here’s this guy with this 500,000 [dollar] camera, and you can see what he’s doing and how he’s approaching it. At one point he was on top of a railing in this weird awkward position, trying to get the perfect angle. But we talk about that in class. So now they got to actually see it,” said Allard. This commercial later went on to win an Emmy Award.

Furthermore, some Mounds View alumni who took her class went on to go into the media industry, working in jobs like film editing. The skills learned and interests discovered prove to be useful for students who are both fascinated by and see a future in these fields, along with others who are just taking the class for fun. “I actually never knew how to edit before this class, and I appreciate learning how to use Premiere Pro, and it’s a pretty interesting app that can definitely be useful,” said senior Maeve Walburg. 

In the future, Allard hopes to expand Interactive Media to dive more into different aspects of Adobe Creative Cloud. She also wants to create a secondary course that is more advanced and applicable to the community than the current sampler-style class. “[We would] maybe do an advanced interactive or something where we would work with industry partners or people in the community that maybe would want our services or that would want students to kind of do an internship or an extended job shadow of some sort,” said Allard. 

For now, Interactive Media aims to break up a student’s schedule with unique skills that students can apply outside of the classroom. It allows for a simple balance between classic STEM classes and more technical art classes, letting students experiment with other mediums to produce art they may not have tried before.