Students construct disaster survival video

A team of SIUC radio-television students hopes its semester-long project will help educate the public about safety and surviving a massive earthquake, which scientists predict may strike the Mississippi River Valley in the next 30 years. Not since 1989 has the Radio-Television Department produced a video program on earthquake preparation. More than a decade later, the class is creating an up-to-date video with newer information and survival tips. By fall, the video may be distributed to local Public Broadcasting stations as well as secondary schools for educational purposes.

With help from WSIU-TV, the local PBS affiliate and the Department of Geology, the students aim to have their seven-minute video aired on 27 PBS stations in the Midwest area. In doing so, they can help residents prepare for another natural disaster predicted to occur within a few decades. Some seismologists are predicting an earthquake of a 6.0 Richter-scale magnitude to strike in the next 30 years along the New Madrid Seismic Zone, a 150-mile fault region that spans over seven states affecting parts of Arkansas to southern Illinois. Scott Hodgson, associate professor of radio and television, leads the course, Client-based Productions, which is working on the hands-on semester-long project worth about $160,000. He said the Dec. 26 tsunami in Asia gave him an extra incentive to choose earthquake awareness as the subject. "With the tsunami, there's a heightened awareness that disasters do strike when people are least expecting it," Hodgson said.

His class of about 20 students began planning the production in January, writing scripts for some scenes, casting actors and designing special effects. By next month, the group will devote most of the time to special effects. Harvey Henson, a research project specialist in the Geology Department, serves as a consultant. For these students, one of the benefits of being involved in the class is working with a high-definition camera, the same equipment that director George Lucas used in making the recent Star Wars movie. With only 10 more shooting days to go, most of the students are learning about the advanced technology as they go. Some of them have production experience but "nothing of this magnitude," said Greg Lederway, a senior studying radio-television from Stony Brook, N.Y. Hodgson said the course presents professional challenges.

"This is way beyond the students' ability," he said. "I like presenting these kinds of challenges - 'I want you to do major special effects Hollywood-style' - and they look at me going, 'Um, I don't know how to do that.'" But with the prospect of receiving national exposure and working with advanced equipment and expectations, the experience will be well worth the time and efforts, students say. Rob Johnson, a senior from Belvidere studying radio-television production, is leading the special effects team for a critical scene the group may begin shooting next month. Though that scene will likely be 10 seconds long, it is anticipated to be a creative feat.

"When the earthquake happens in this video, there's actually a scene where we journey to the center of the earth and see the tetonic plates shift," Lederway said. "Yeah, that's going to be quite an undertaking." The class has been shooting scenes everywhere from Cairo to Hodgson's house in an effort to bring a real depiction of an earthquake in this region and show how residents can survive the impact and its aftermath, Hodgson said. "I always try to do something that has a service-learning environment, where you're actually trying to make a difference, and this is something where we think we can make a difference," he said.