Dad’s Lesson Starts Son’s Film Career

When fifth-grader Ken Roy’s father brought home a state-of-the-art camcorder back in 1994, he laid down a strict rule: Ken could use the camera only after he read the accompanying owner’s manual.

A little reading did not stop the boy, who pored over the manual’s 60 pages on such topics as zooming, lighting and which buttons to push for fading to black.

“My dad stuck to his word,” said the award-winning high school filmmaker last week from his Woodland Hills home. “I read that entire manual, and after that, I knew how to do everything.”

In the years since, Roy, 18, and a senior at Viewpoint School in Calabasas, has used a video camera the way most students use a calculator or computer, turning in homework assignments, book reports and complicated biological studies on videotape.

“He just sees the world differently than most people,” said Catherine Dunn, chairman of the school’s film and video department. “Words are just not enough for him.”

What started as a father’s lesson to a son to protect an expensive piece of equipment may become a man’s career. Roy used every penny he has earned from summer jobs--around $7,000--to buy equipment for his bedroom “studio.” He is especially interested in animation.

Earlier this month, Roy and fellow Viewpoint student Adam Leier won first place in the student animation category at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Roy also took first in January for film and video production in a competition sponsored by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. The publicly funded organization helps emerging artists in dance, film, video and other disciplines.

Roy’s first assignment for a film and video class at Viewpoint was a three- to five-minute narrative piece. What he turned in “blew us all away,” Dunn said.

Roy’s was a technically sophisticated piece that combined live action and animation. “To have the fortitude to pull something like that off . . . was incredible,” Dunn said.

So incredible, in fact, that Dunn overlooked Roy missing the due date for the assignment by months. Because of the complex technical aspects of the short video work, Roy took an incomplete in the class and finished the work over the summer, rather than turn in something below his standards.

“He had chosen to go above and beyond for the assignment,” Dunn said. “Any teacher would give their right arm for that. He took the assignment to the next level--the next 20 levels.”

Roy was recently chosen as one of 2,600 candidates for the 2001 Presidential Scholars Program, which recognizes students with high academic and artistic achievement, leadership skills and strong community involvement.

He is also keeping his fingers crossed for a thick admissions packet from California Institute for the Arts in Valencia, one of the nation’s premiere arts schools. It is the only school he applied to, because he never got around to completing other applications, he said.

“I adore him,” Dunn said. “I feel very lucky to have known him.”

Roy’s work can be seen at https://www.kenroy.com.

KUDOS

Matthew Schwartz, a seventh-grader at Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School in Northridge, has been chosen to attend the 3rd World Summit on Media for Children--a three-day conference to be held in Greece starting March 23. It will bring teachers, researchers, academics and children from the five continents together to discuss media and to collaborate on filmmaking.

END NOTES

Groundbreaking ceremonies are scheduled today for Valencia’s newest school, Bridgeport Elementary. The 14th school in the Saugus Union School District is scheduled to open in August 2002. . . . The W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles recently awarded Cal State Northridge $600,000 to establish a Materials Science Research Center, which administrators said would foster a higher level of research and collaboration between experimental work in engineering and theoretical work in physics.