If you're game, tune into the Golden Globes 75th Anniversary Special, airing Wednesday night at 9pm ET on NBC. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of clips of old Golden Globes shows, many showing Hollywood stars engaged in booze-fueled silliness. But there also will be a short clip presented during the show that means the world to me.
The clip will feature a group of students at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, whose Cinematic Arts department is one of the organizations financially supported by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which presents the Golden Globes. The clip will show a team of LACHSA students as they prepare a film for the school's 64 Hour Film Festival, in which students must write, cast, scout, shoot, and edit a short film in a randomly-selected genre in just 64 hours. In this team's case, they are producing a musical, which also meant writing original songs and a score in that limited time.
Why does this matter? It matters to me because the director and leader of the team that will be featured on NBC tomorrow night is my son, Brian Niles.
Brian has helped me with video production here on Theme Park Insider since he was in elementary school, and he even has done a lot of the design work for the site over the years, so you know his work already. His teams have won the school's 64 Hour Film Festival three years in a row, and after watching this year's festival, William H. Macy (whose daughter also goes to LACHSA) brought Brian's team's film to the HFPA.
I linked to Brian's team's film in a post on our Discussion Forum just after the festival, and my wife, Laurie, wrote about the team's work to score and record the music for the film.
In addition to being featured on the Golden Globes special, this month Brian was one of 11 high school students in American to be named a Cinematic Arts Finalist by the National YoungArts Foundation, which runs the nation's top arts competition for high school students. Two other film students from Brian's school were honored as finalists, and one of the other members of Brian's 64 Hour team, Roxy Jamin, was named a finalist in Design Arts, as well. The 171 finalists across all disciplines around the nation, including 22 from the LA area, will be flown to Miami in January for a week-long program of master classes and workshops with industry professionals.
If you are craving a theme park connection at this point, the now-former director of LACHSA's Cinematic Arts department — under whose leadership the department had more YoungArts honorees than any other high school arts department in the nation — last summer accepted a job with Universal Creative. And I know that students in the department have been talking with mentors in the theme park design business, so some of these kids might be on their way to theme park design careers as well as film and television productions. If you're a kid looking to get into theme park design, get involved in your school's theater, cinema, and design programs. Apply for YoungArts. The industry is growing and looking for talent.
So I hope that you will tune in and enjoy a quick look at what tomorrow's artists are doing today. Thanks for watching!
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Anyways, when Jennifer Lopez presented the Golden Globes with Jeremy Renner, it was magical.
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