Lights, Camera, Education : Life imitates art as high school students enthusiastically learn all about the craft of filmmaking.

The scene: Two high school students, alone together in a classroom while onan errand, open a teacher’s desk drawer and discover a cryptic note.

The note fortuitously leads them to a scandal: Some faculty members have embezzled $500,000 in school funds.

It’s the story line of “Rapacity,” a suspense drama scripted by a 17-year-old Burroughs High School senior named Michael V. Gerhard and produced on video as a class project in this, the inaugural year of the school’s Warner Bros. Cinema & Video Academy, named for its benefactor.

As cameras roll, instructor Todd Aaron Jensen--who’s so youthful and ebullient that his 25 students call him “Todd”--watches impassively, then leaps to his feet and shouts: “Cut!”

“What we have here is a failure to communicate!” Jensen says, mimicking a line from the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke.” He tells the class of mostly 11th- and 12th-graders, along with a few outsiders, “None of that is usable. The frame-ups were just wrong. We all need to communicate.

“Please! Make sure that we’ve got on tape exactly what we need. If we were on a pro set all day, we’d have lost several thousand dollars, if not $100,000 or so. For nothing!”

He nods at Gerhard, reminding everyone coolly but firmly that Gerhard is the drama’s director-writer: “This is God! For the next seven days!”

“He created us?” Anita Curran, 16, a class member, asks in mock surprise.

Everyone dissolves into laughter, a burst of comic relief during an elective class in which students write, cast and direct their own productions, as well as participate in those of their classmates--either in front of the cameras or behind them.

Patterned after a business academy on the same campus, the Warner Bros. Cinema & Video Academy is believed to be the first of its kind in the United States--a major studio collaborating with a local high school, in response to California’s new public-education mantra of “student as worker, teacher as coach.”

As Keith Myatt, the program’s faculty coordinator, points out, “It’s learning by doing. Instead of kids just passively learning about, say, the Civil War, why not have them act it out? If we do that, I’m sure the schools will hold on to more and more of these kids.”

Actually, not all the academy’s 70 enrollees are students at Burroughs, the alma mater of filmdom’s Debbie Reynolds, Ron Howard and Tim Burton, which sits conveniently just a casting call away from Warner, the Walt Disney Co., Universal Studios and NBC.

A few attend college nearby or hold odd jobs. Because the academy is part of Los Angeles County’s Regional Occupational Program (ROP)--which meets students’ changing needs in vocational and technical skills in fields from banking to welding--enrollment is granted to anyone 16 or older.

Angela Heine, 19, a film major at Cal State Northridge and a Burbank High School graduate, says Jensen’s video class (a filmmaking course at Cal State was overcrowded, she says) serves her ambition of becoming a film director.

“It’s an opportunity to do something with my ideas,” Heine says, adding that she’ll submit her class project--a love story with only music as sound--for admission to CalArts in Valencia.

Anita Curran, on the other hand, says she wants to act and write, having enrolled in Jensen’s class “to gain some knowledge about being behind the camera.”

Not everyone, however, will be Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock, says Susan Boegh, the Burbank Unified School District’s director of secondary programs. But, she says, ROP classes “raise the relevance of what they’re learning, so people won’t have to end up learning after they get fired from their first job. And, we’re keeping them in school.”

At the cinema/video academy, Warner provides state-of-the-art technology, pays for instructors Jensen and Todd Pam (who teaches introductory camera work and editing to ninth- and 10th-graders) and helps shape the curriculum.

Students are introduced to film history and criticism, trends, budgeting, screenwriting, pitching presentations to producers, casting, location scouting and editing, as well as directing and producing, among other topics, while studying works such as “Casablanca,” “Wayne’s World,” “The Graduate” and “Psycho.” Moreover, a Warner stunt coordinator works with students as a volunteer.

Some of the academy videos are simple; some are arty; many have an MTV flair. A three-minute clip of black-and-white visuals taken at odd camera angles--Burroughs High cheerleaders doing calisthenics, the football team practicing, a pep rally--plays to a rap soundtrack of “I Get Around” by Tupac Shakur. It ends with a girl hanging upside down from a chin-up bar and saying, “I hope you come back.”

In another, a mock karate fight between male students is accompanied by the Doors’ 1960s hit “People Are Strange.” At the end, a student in glasses and baseball cap, a la film director Spike Lee, says: “Hope you enjoyed it. A reminder: Clean up your act, and clean up this school. Keep it the best it can be. See you later.”

For their part, Warner officials say they expect to benefit from “an increased talent pool” of youngsters to meet future demands of the video explosion and of TV’s expansion to as many as 500 channels per household. Officials won’t say how much the academy costs, beyond a Warner subsidiary’s $50,000 purchase of video equipment for Burbank’s school district in 1989.

The academy got its early push from Kapuua d’auClawre, director of public affairs for Warner, who noted that secondary schools could better serve the so-called “Nintendo generation” by teaching some of what film majors learn in college.

“When you merge technology with basic, old-fashioned education, you can reach that student who won’t read a textbook because he’s bored or who speaks English as a second language or who daydreams about girls,” d’auClawre says.

“By teaching them how to operate a camera and write a script, along with subjects such as English, math and history, you’ve got those kids’ attention. They think they’re having fun, not really knowing that they’re also learning.”

For that reason, academy 11th- and 12th-graders also learn how their required academic courses can apply to cinema. Example: Chemistry students learn “something about the chemistry of film,” Keith Myatt says. “How does film make color? How does it all work?”

The academy’s instructors also help youngsters who struggle with traditional academic subjects.

Says teacher Jensen, who majored in English at UCLA and who writes screenplays and newspaper stories on entertainment: “Anybody with a couple of hours on camera can also learn how to move the direct lighting. But it also gives me an opportunity to slip them some English, to slip them some of the other skills they’ll need.”

Academies, then, enable what Myatt calls “clusters” of students to focus on career paths.

“If you’re in our academy, and if I’m the history teacher, we’re going to talk about film and its influences,” he says. “We could teach all of World War II and the Vietnam War--both the romanticized version and the reality. There’s a lot of footage--film clips and newsreels--and even real letters the troops wrote home.

“I won’t teach you history, but how to become a historian. Again, that’s the ‘student as worker.’ I’ll tell you how to find out about how people dressed in the 1770s. You’re going to do the work. Go get it!”

Meanwhile, as Todd Aaron Jensen’s students sweat the details of filmmaking, they painstakingly shoot retakes of scenes from Michael V. Gerhard’s drama “Rapacity,” with Jensen lecturing, coaching, exhorting and inspiring them to reach for the stars.

“You’ll come out of this class with, if nothing else, a greater appreciation of what happens on the set,” he tells them. “All I need from you is focus. All Michael needs from you is focus. . . .

“This is our crash course in guerrilla filmmaking!” Jensen concludes, his voice rising. “We’re a team!”

For the moment, the students stand there speechless, spellbound by Jensen’s pep talk--until a girl in the class speaks up. “Have we got that on tape?” she asks lightheartedly, but true to the cinema academy’s mission.

“Yeah,” says Michael V. Gerhard, the youngster whom Jensen has designated as “God” for these seven days. “That was a great speech.”

Where and When

What: Warner Bros. Cinema & Video Academy, Burroughs High School, 1920 W. Clark Ave., Burbank.

Eligibility: Students who are at least 16 (they need not be enrolled at Burroughs High School), as well as adults.

Price: Free (minors), $40 per semester (adults). Registration deadline is Feb. 15 for next semester.

Call: Marlee Edge, Burroughs High School’s Regional Occupational Program coordinator, (818) 558-5490.