Clara Hasegawa, bottom left, with her Lancaster University filmmaking group.
This summer, Clara Hasegawa ’29, a film major in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, crossed the Atlantic for an immersive academic three-week program through the Fulbright UK Summer Institutes. Only 30 students were selected nationwide for this prestigious program.
The defining challenge of her program at Lancaster University was collaborative filmmaking—pitching, critiquing and producing a script as a team that would share a single grade.
Going in, she worried about managing creative differences among a group of equally passionate filmmakers. Instead, she found the experience to be the highlight of her trip. After each student wrote and pitched a short screenplay, the group settled on one story to produce together and divided up production roles.
Hasegawa ended up as sound designer, a role she’d never held before, working alongside a first-time cinematographer and a first-time director.
The group’s film explored the anthropocene, the time we are living in, using Lancaster’s city streets to evoke humanity’s disruption of the natural world. Hasegawa built much of the soundscape from field recordings of traffic and crowds, and in hindsight, wishes she’d gathered even more raw audio to layer into the mix.
Beyond the shoot itself, weekend travel to Liverpool, the Lake District and London gave her a broader sense of British storytelling traditions, from the Beatles Museum to Beatrix Potter’s house to the West End stages.