DAVID GADDIS

My educational and career path has been unconventional, but with each stop along the way, I’ve gained some knowledge and experience that has informed my teaching method. My educational journey began in the sciences, earning my Bachelor’s of Arts in psychology from Hiram College. At Hiram, my experience was built on a foundation of experimentation and research.  From there I spent several years working in the clergy as a youth pastor in Northeast Ohio. As a youth pastor I was tasked with finding creative means to teach spiritual values to teenagers, this was accomplished with creating experiential sessions in which learning occurs organically. From there I achieved a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio University learning Industry standard techniques and practices. Now as a filmmaker and educator, I plan to incorporate both approaches into my classroom: teaching industry standard techniques with a heavy emphasis communal hands-on learning, research and experimentation. 

 

As a Teaching Assistant, my responsibilities included teaching some aspects of the Sound Techniques class for first year MFA students. In this role, an experiential approach was employed to get students to understand different aspects of location sound recording. In one such exercise we created an environment where students discovered the pickup patterns on microphones. Students were given a variety of microphones and told to take some time utilizing each microphone and to notate the directionality and sound of each. Students were then given a variety of scenes and told to record sound and video. After reviewing each students findings, the professor gave a lecture on microphone usage and explained industry standard practice on which microphone was generally used for each scenario. It is this teaching style that I plan to employ in my classroom. The experimentation gives each student the ability to understand how each tool responds. And with that experimentation comes the opportunity to use that tool in a manner that has not been done yet allow students to innovate new techniques and to stay on the leading edge of film production. Simply teaching industry standard practices while valuable ultimately limits the students potential as they will only do what already been done. 

 

I believe that it’s as important for a student to write/create what they like as what they know.  Writing what you know allows you to speak from a place of honesty and authority and it brings an sense of authenticity to you work.  However what you like engages your passions and creative drive more, and that passion translates well to the screen. So when an artist wants to create something that is beyond their experience, I believe it is up to the filmmaker to educate himself or herself on the topic so that authenticity and passion meet on the screen. For my film David Turner, I came from a unique place in that I was writing a story of personal experience, a lot of the film’s plot points came from actual experiences that I have had dealing with schizophrenia in my family.  So to prepare for this film I went through old journal entries, talked to family members and interviewed myself to get to the emotions and issues that David Turner addresses. Whereas in my thesis Take Flight, I was speaking about violence in the home, a subject I do not have experience with. So to create as honest an experience as possible, I took it upon myself to conduct research on domestic violence. I read scholarly journals that spoke about the effect of abuse on teenagers, I spoke to and interviewed victims of domestic violence and viewed documentaries on domestic violence to create as authentic of an experience as I could. Reflecting back on my process I would have liked to shoot a short subject documentary on domestic violence as research for the narrative. This is the type of work I would like to see from my students as they tackle their thesis projects. To take time out and use the research techniques I learned from my psychology background to create an honest experience. 

 

Filmmaking is a collaborative art form and so I’ve garnered my teaching style to reflect the filmmaking experience.  In my undergraduate experience I attended a very small college where the students and faculty got to know each other very well. It was not unusual for professors to have the entire class over for dinner and we would talk about scholarly pursuits as well as life. As a student this made for an environment where I felt as though I could go to my professors for assistance and guidance. My teaching style is very relational. Though I don’t see myself having students over like I experienced, I do believe in getting invested in the lives of my students and creating a mentoring relationship. In my experience, the instructors that I learned the most from were the ones to which I felt I could go to at any time for anything.  As a professor, I would employ a similar philosophy with my students.

 

It’s been an interesting journey from student to teacher. I look forward to the challenge, opportunity and responsibility of molding creative minds. I feel my approach not only prepares students for careers in film production but allows for them to discover who they are as an artist and to create an environment that allows them to flourish in that.