Never mind the emotional value vested into the projects. Never mind that the current project on the MSU Formula Racing Team is a year’s worth of student collaboration by club president Sean McAninch that has resulted in two videos, with the third currently being produced. Never mind that the film on hip-hop culture in the Lansing area is club editorial board member Matt Ortlieb’s brainchild he’s been fostering since last spring semester.

It’s something the 25-or-so club members do for fun — a low-key extracurricular. But documentary films also are something they have a passion for, something they feel has a real place within society today.

“It can teach — be an educational tool. I think most importantly it gets people thinking,” said Ortlieb, a telecommunication, information studies and media senior. “Even if it’s a really biased documentary, like if you look at Michael Moore’s films, he’s notorious for being really slanted, but no matter how you feel about ‘Bowling for Columbine,’ it gets you thinking about gun issues in America. If somebody sees our documentary about hip-hop in Lansing and they hate it and they think it’s crap, well maybe they will learn a little bit and say, ‘Hey, I can go catch a show,’ or if they hear some music on the radio they will know those guys are from Lansing.”

Formula Racing

It started with a film piece for the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The two registered student organizations — the Documentary Film Club and the MSU Formula Racing Team — collaborated to create a video to suit the racing team’s needs.

The film required bringing the race car into the WKAR studios in the Communication Arts and Sciences Building, where they worked on the lighting for hours to make it just right.

The piece was distributed at the auto show in January and also was played on a big screen at their stand.

“We actually got the opportunity to go down during the press preview and walk around, which was really cool,” said McAninch, a media and communication technology senior.

From this initial project grew two more projects: One for the unveiling of the formula team’s car where interviews and filming took place in the shop while the car was being built and the latest film, a year in review.

“The biggest thing with the formula project is the style that we wanted to create with it is like something you would see on the Discovery Channel — that type of feel for that project,” McAninch said.

Adam Zemke, an MSU alumnus who graduated in May and is project manager for the MSU Formula Racing Team, said he is thrilled with the results from the club, as well as their professionalism.

“They are amazing. I know Sean did a lot of the editing personally, and I’m extremely impressed with the quality of his work,” Zemke said. “He always met the deadlines when we needed them, and I asked him to try to be creative with the films and sort of incorporate the edge that he wanted to and I think it really excelled as a result of that. He came up with the idea to incorporate a vast majority of the film to be part of an interview exposé and that was quite a bit different than any of our previous videos, and I think it really helped out a lot to give the audience a full picture of our organization.”

Working with student organizations is not unusual for the club, McAninch said.

“Over the course of the year, usually one of the projects is something like that where we’re working with groups on campus,” he said. “A lot of the projects have been like that.”

Hip-hop in Lansing

Though he has only belonged to the Documentary Film Club for the past year, Ortlieb dove right in.

An East Lansing native and hip-hop fan, Ortlieb had been thinking about the idea for the film on hip-hop culture in the Lansing area for some time.

“When I was in community college, I wanted to be a sociology professor, and my teacher in high school turned me on to studying hip-hop culture and music from a sociological perspective,” he said. “I always wanted to do a documentary or some kind of film exploring that kind of stuff, so I’d been thinking about it for a while and … when I started going to shows in Lansing and started seeing that it’s really here, I pitched the idea.”

It’s a project Ortlieb considers personal — the blood, sweat and tears poured into it surpass any other film project he has done. It will be his longest yet, possibly longer than 30 minutes in length.

“It’s also a little overwhelming being the point person for the documentary, I mean I have at least 10 tapes now and I captured everything to a hard drive — looking at all the footage is kind of scary,” he said. “The other day I realized I have to step back and put this all together, we have to frame it and focus it. It’s not just these interviews are great but we’ve got to put it together somehow.”

One of Ortlieb’s goals for the film is to not only showcase the hip-hop music that sounds straight from Lansing, but also inform the MSU community about the culture that is its neighbor.

“There’s this big disconnect between MSU and then the Lansing hip-hop scene. There’s a ton of kids at MSU that I know that love hip-hop music, especially this kind of stuff — these guys I’m profiling in the piece, they are not (performing) the stuff that you hear on the radio. They talk about real issues, they aren’t talking about material things too much,” Ortlieb said. “I think that it’s the kind of music more college kids get into and I don’t understand why there’s this disconnect when it’s just down the road.”

Robert Albers, a senior video specialist in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media, is the club’s adviser. He also is a veteran documentary filmmaker. One thing he tries to instill in his students, and in the club’s members, is the art of storytelling.

“It’s a great combination of storytelling, photography, incredibly interesting people and amazing things that happen in the world around us,” Albers said. “So when you look at the world around us, if you look with a critical eye and a careful eye, you are going to see things that move you, that make you happy, that make you sad, that fill you with awe, and those are things that are right in front of us. And sometimes it’s just a matter of where to point your eyes and point your camera and it becomes very exciting.”