3 Questions

It's not every day that students from multiple high schools come together and work together, but for the upcoming first annual Youthquake event (various times Thursday-Sunday April 19-April 22. Free or $8, depending on event. youthquakesf.com) at Violet Crown Cinema (1606 Alcaldesa St., 216-5678) and Studio Center of Santa Fe (1614 Paseo de Peralta, 989-4423), that's exactly what happened. Created at Desert Academy and including students from Santa Fe High, New Mexico School for the Arts, Santa Fe Prep and others, Youthquake highlights the artistic efforts of local teens in a variety of media, and we caught up with organizer and Desert Academy film department head Jake Mulliken to get the lowdown.

Where'd the idea come from?

I, for one, thought the traditional school arts thing was kind of lame. It was almost like showing up to church—you sit there, you see it, you leave. I've done something like this before, but I submitted a grant to the Skylark Foundation in Los Angeles, and originally it was supposed to be, like, a day-long art binge with movies and galleries and stuff. But I got in cahoots with Kim Langbecker from the board at Studio Center, and it turned into this five-day arts event. That was the goal for three years down the road. The real goal with this thing was not to just give Desert Academy a chance, but … schools in general are really bad at working together, so the idea behind this format was to create a social arts curriculum. The goal is to still, in the next three years, have films up from every school in New Mexico and have an annual week-long New Mexico high school film festival.

What kind of films have been created?

The best way to describe it would be 'eclectic.' We've got some really solid animation and experimental shorts. Students have done everything from focusing on certain techniques; we've got a zombie flick, some homages to The Twilight Zone, some ridiculous attempts at comedy. I made the excellent call of showing them David Lynch. We've got some really cool abstract, surrealist flicks, too.

Did you learn anything new during the process?

It's always kind of interesting that the times I've stopped teaching and gone to produce my own stuff with adults, it's always really frustrating. But the kids, some of them have been doing this their entire childhoods, so they have the skills, but they don't have the bad habits. There's not a lot of fear there. They're willing to takes risks and swing for the fences. It was really cool to watch them and think, 'Y'know, maybe I should be less rigid in my own work.' The real thing I learned was to just have fun and go for it.