Student Spotlight of the Week: Ryan Harvey

February 05, 2019 Jacob Loher, Staff Writer

Do you ever wonder how films are made? Do you ever think about how much time and effort actually goes into creating a film? Well, Ryan Harvey does. 

Harvey is a third year student at Sonoma State University and he is also the general manager of the campus video production outlet Studio Blue 

“Ryan has some very serious goals to professionalize Studio Blue,” Professor Talena Sanders said. 

Harvey is also in the process of becoming the founder of the on campus film club which will be active next semester as well as creating everything that is portrayed on LoboVision. 

Harvey got really into video in the third grade when his dad got a small digital camera that he made stop motion movies with. He began his expertise by using Lego figures in his stop action films. 

He decided after doing that for some time that he was ready for his next big step of diving head first into live action film. 

When Harvey got into high school, he immersed himself in a mass of media classes in which he familiarized himself with the Adobe Suite. Once he was able to gain this experience in high school he continued to pursue his passion for film production. 

“[Adobe] Premiere has always been my favorite program to work in, except recently with Seawolf Living I had to self teach myself Photoshop and After Effects,” Harvey said. 

Harvey won Campus Movie Fest his freshman year at Sonoma State. The following year he and his team created two films that both won locally and both got invited to the Cannes Film Festival.

 His first film is titled “The UnDocumentary,” which captures the stories of undocumented students. The second film is titled “Fist Full of Cache,” which portrays the story of friends geocaching together. He has just recently received a third invite to this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but he will not be attending. The only students that had the opportunity of attending Cannes were students from Campus Movie Fest. 

Harvey’s most recent film, “Hotline Apocalypse,” which he worked on with his partner Jason Gorelick, has received an invite to Cannes. He received two Silver Tripod nominations, the Audience Choice award, the Film of the Week award, and the Jury award which only four films can win at every school. His team ended up walking away with two Jury awards, and the team planned for six months on how to capture this film and then in two days executed their plan. Harvey edited this film for 30 straight hours because the rule of Campus Movie Fest is you cannot produce content leading up to the week of the event. 

Harvey and Gorelick met in Georgia at Campus Movie Fest while viewing a screening of a film. After meeting they agreed to make movies together from then on out.

 “We work well together because I’m a big picture kind of guy and Ryan is very detail oriented and has an incredible work ethic,” Gorelick said.

Harvey has his goal for graduation set for Spring of 2020 in which he hopes to pursue digital effect compositing or editing professionally further. 

“My favorite part of the whole process is editing,” said Harvey. He has no preference on where he starts after graduation just as long as he is happy. 

He knows that editing is his calling and that it is where he is meant to be.