Here’s a peek from concept through production of the bus Savannah College of Art and Design is exporting to Art Basel Miami Beach. The complimentary shuttle will run Dec. 4-8 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and transport riders from UNTITLED. Miami Beach (bus stop located at 10th Street and Ocean Drive) and The M Building (194 NW 30th Street), home to Wendy White: CURVA, in the Wynwood Art District.

It took three days to wrap the vehicle in the vibrant paintings of Xiaolu Zhang (M.F.A., Painting) and the bright magenta that’s sure to catch a few stares along the 6-mile loop between Wynwood and Ocean Drive.

Every inch of the shuttle was covered, even the roof, where one last portrait will give airborne enthusiasts, and the many helicopters that are sure to be circling, a focal point.

Let’s just call this an Art Basel debut for Xiaolu’s ‘Little Evils’ series, which harkens back to a time before life became too serious. The perfect tenor, I'd say, for ABMB.

Yesterday, Academy Award-winning director and producer Lee Daniels delivered the commencement address at SCAD's very first fall commencement ceremony in Savannah. Lee told graduates and their families, “I couldn’t afford to go to college and I was angry about that for a long time. This would have been the college that I went to because it’s pretty badass.” SCAD awarded Lee the Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

What happens when you turn dozens of inventive art students loose on the streets of a medieval village in late October? A Halloween celebration for the ages. Savannah College of Art and Design students imported the festive atmosphere of Halloween here to Provence last week. The annual event started several years ago when students studying in Lacoste wanted to bring their Halloween traditions with them overseas. Now more than 500 villagers celebrate every year with the students, who organize pumpkin carving and face painting workshops for local children.

Revelers traveled from Avignon and Marseille to Lacoste to get a taste of a "real" Halloween party.

The old bakery of the village, the Boulangerie, became the Boo-langerie. During their free time, students spent about a week decorating the main street of the village and transforming studios and classrooms into haunted houses.

Some students bring a costume with them when they pack for France, and some get creative with what they have on hand or find here in Lacoste. Everyone gets excited the few days and hours before the event, posting on Facebook about having face paint or costumes to lend. The festival is an opportunity for the students to come together, relax and spend a great afternoon with the community.

Halloween would not be Halloween without pumpkins. It's a challenge to find the 100 pumpkins needed for the children's carving workshop. A local farmer from the village usually grows the pumpkins especially for SCAD. Though the carving workshop is intense for the student volunteers, seeing the kids walk through the streets of Lacoste with a small carved pumpkin in their hands is plenty of reward.

This year, all of our professors joined the festivities and welcomed visitors into the printmaking studio, which they transformed into a dark catacomb. You don't need many decorations to make a medieval cave look appropriate for Halloween, which is one reason why this festival is here to stay.

Cedric Maros is an events and communications coordinator at Savannah College of Art and Design in Lacoste. He came to SCAD in 2010 after working as a production manager in the movie industry.

You might say that the luck of the Irish is with emerging filmmaker Ciaran McGuigan. Mo Chara, the first film that Ciaran directed, was accepted into the Savannah Film Festival and is steadily growing in acclaim. In between stints as a professional soccer player and an assistant soccer coach at Savannah College of Art and Design, Ciaran made this film about school age boys whose friendship overcomes the Catholic-Protestant rivalry in Northern Ireland. I sat down with him this week in Savannah, where he’s visiting from his native Ireland with his mom, Rosie. Rosie and Ciaran’s father came of age in the 1970s as the ‘Irish troubles’ flared, but they taught their children to find common ground with all people, regardless of race or religion. It was this upbringing that inspired Ciaran to make “Mo Chara.”

TM: Thanks for taking a break from the festival to talk with me. So did you always know that you wanted to make films?

CM: When I came to SCAD, I told my dad that I thought I would do interior design or architecture, something that would tie back into the family furniture business. Dad rang me up and he was like, "Try something different so you have a few bows to your arrow." Is that the saying?

TM: Yep.

CM: Dad said, "Why don’t you do film?" I didn’t really want to do film at the start.  He said, "No, do it you’ll enjoy it." I ended up doing it, but I was really intimidated by film at first.

TM: I understand what you mean. This is only my second film festival and I feel like I have to speak a certain language.

CM: Well, I didn’t know anything about the history of film or RED cameras and stuff. It really intimidates you at the start. But Professor Chaney, he just goes, "Forget about the big cameras and forget about 50-man crews, it’s all about the story." That really registered for me.

TM: That’s so true. Focus on story. So let's go to Mo Chara. You’re in the program and…

CM: I thought it would be interesting to teach people in America about kids in Belfast, how they conduct themselves, how they speak, and what their view on life is. Growing up as a kid in Northern Ireland, there are Protestants and there are Catholics, and the two are usually very separate. But in Mo Chara these two little boys have common interests. They support the same soccer team, they like soccer, and their religion doesn’t really matter. I wrote the film on the bus to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving.

TM: Almost exactly a year ago. You just wrote it a year ago?

CM: Yes. I had it all written in the notes on my phone. Two boys meet, there’s a conflict, then there’s a resolution at the end. My uncle (director of photography Kieran McGuigan) told me with that everything in life there’s a beginning, middle, and end, and that if you stick to that three-act play then you’ve got the foundations to make a good film. So that always stuck with me.

TM: You had those basic things.

CM: Right. And for me it was like filling in the blanks almost.

TM: This is for your senior thesis film?

CM: Yes.

TM: When did you shoot Mo Chara?

CM: We shot Mo Chara in March 2013 over spring break. I got a flight home to Ireland. There’s only one other kid from SCAD who came. Sean Robinson, he was fantastic, he was my first assistant director.

TM: So you’re the writer-director of Mo Chara?

CM: I’m the writer, director and producer, yeah. We literally, eh, had no money. Our Kickstarter was in shambles.

TM: How much did you raise with Kickstarter?

CM: A few hundred dollars. We all stayed in my grandmother’s house. She woke us up every morning with porridge and a full Irish breakfast fry. We stayed in my cousin’s house where my mom grew up. My auntie lives there now and they all gave up their beds for my six crew. We woke up every morning and traveled an hour to Belfast. My cousin Robert drove us and my cousin Laura was there in the camper van making breakfast and tea on set.

TM: How did you raise the rest of the cash to fund the production?

CM: Budgeting wise, we shot the whole film for around 2,500 to 3000 pounds. I used some savings from football that I had. My mom and dad were very generous, as well. I took a loan out. Then, after we shot it, the grandfather of one of the boys in the film, Mr. Bryne, I gave him an executive producer credit. He came up to me and gave me a check. He said, “What you have done for these kids to foster cross-border relationships between a Protestant and a Catholic is terrific. Go and do good things with this film. Go and get it into festivals.” I was really emotional because I just couldn’t believe that this guy would give me 2000 pounds.

TM: That’s wonderful. I really liked what you said at the Q-and-A after the screening about the importance of having an international crew. Tell me about that.

CM: The editor is from Spain, the art director is from Colombia, the director of photography is from London, the grip is a French guy. You bring different cultures together and they bring different things to the plate, their experiences and their know-how. You sit down over dinner and a coffee and you’re joking, and then things come into the conversation about what we’re going to do. Everyone had an open ear. There were no egos. I said to them, "This is our film, it’s a collaboration." For me, problem solving and creating with other artists, that’s just epic. It was such a joyful and amazing experience.

TM: W.C. Fields said to never work with animals or children because they’re unpredictable. But you chose to work with children. Where did you discover the talented young actors?

CM: At first, I had this casting call and it just didn’t work. These parents were coming in and teaching their kids what to do. They were posh kids coming in and a trying to act raw and I was like, "No, I want this raw element to it." So I went into the streets with a family friend of mine, and we ended up meeting Nathan Corbett and Ben Labourn. The boys had never acted before in their lives.

TM: I can’t believe you directed untested actors in your first film. That’s crazy.

CM: They’re the best lads you’ll every meet. Impeccable manners. I had one hundred pounds each for them in the budget. I took them to the soccer store to buy them a football jersey and football boots. One them said, "Ciaran, can I get a pack of these football cards, I’ll put my boots back." The cards were like one pound. I was like, "You can have the boots, too." I bought them like 15 packs of cards and they could not believe that.

TM: What does it mean to have your film shown at a festival? What went through your head when you got the call?

CM: To have “Mo Chara” showing at a festival is fantastic, but to have it showing at this festival, in Savannah where I know everybody, I’m so overwhelmed by it. When I got the email telling me that I had been accepted I was so happy because I got to come back and thank everybody for helping to make it happen. Frankly, it was this institution that provided me with the foundation to enter into a career or a medium of art that I didn’t have a clue that I was any good at. You can’t speak highly enough of this college. I am really honored and thankful that I was able to go to school here.

Ciaran is currently finishing his degree online while playing soccer in Ireland. He plans to enter “Mo Chara” into more festivals soon and will graduate from SCAD with a B.F.A in film and television this spring.

There’s something about the weather this time of year. When it starts to get a little cooler I get excited about movies. The nip in the air indicates the arrival of the Savannah Film Festival! 

This is my favorite week of the academic year. Students, faculty, staff, locals, out of town guests, industry professionals, and celebrities all convene to celebrate what we love most about cinema. I’ve been to a lot of festivals, from Sundance, to SXSW, to Cannes, and I’ve never experienced a festival atmosphere quite as special as the one here. We’re all here for the same reason, to celebrate the movies and explore how to make better ones.

Academy-Award winning actor Jeremy Irons, left, with Savannah College of Art and Design professor Michael Chaney during a Q-and-A at the 2013 Savannah Film Festival.

This was evident on Saturday morning when things kicked off with a master class with Alexander Payne. Assuaging concerns about staying on schedule, the Oscar-winning director insisted on taking more questions from students. “This is why I’m here!” he told us. This is why we’re all here. 

This week promises much to be explored. Great films, great discussions, and great workshops and panels. I’ve already identified one of my favorite moments from this year’s festival: seeing Alexander Payne’s Nebraska on opening night. I’ve followed Alexander’s career since his first film, Citizen Ruth, and have reveled in every one of his directorial efforts including Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, and The Descendants. 

There are a ton of opportunities this week for film lovers. I’m particularly interested in the not-so-documentary documentary Seduced and Abandoned by James Toback and Alec Baldwin, screening tonight at Trustees Theater. Toback and Baldwin were here at the festival a couple of years ago presenting a riff on Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. I’m excited to see how their Vaudeville-esque relationship translates to the screen as they tromp around Cannes trying to talk A-listers into being a part of their political-erotic re-make of Last Tango in Paris (Last Tango in Tikrit?). I’m pretty sure the Q-and-A after the screening will be full of treasures about their experience. There’s so much more to come!

Michael Chaney will host coffee talks with filmmakers and industry professionals in the lobby of the Marshall House at 8:15 a.m. each day this week.

The crimson stripe of the red carpet at the perennial block party hosted by Savannah College of Art and Design to kick off the Savannah Film Festival was upstaged last night. During the Broughton Street celebration preceding the first screening of the week, revelers looked up to find a sea of 10,000 multicolored paper airplanes descending from the roof of Jen Library.

The spectacle was a nod to the bursts of color artist Rob Bliss sent hurtling from rooftops in Grand Rapids, Michigan for the 2009 ArtPrize Paper Airplane Event.

A surprise conclusion is the calling card that SCAD leaves an audience at many of its events. A glow in the dark finale, one hundred painted mattresses transformed into furniture, dozens of beach balls bouncing through Commencement. These are just a few of the memorable scenes that SCAD has created.

I got wind of the plans for this one, went looking for the brains behind the operation, and found maintenance man Ken Saunders.

Turns out that Ken has rigged some of the university’s most memorable ‘wow’ moments for 13 years now. He may just get a few sentences describing a vision and then he sets about rigging it into existence.

To pull off the cascade of airplanes last night, Ken’s team spent the week unpacking and taping thousands of airplanes that arrived as flat pieces of paper. Then there was the matter of giving them a boost. For that, Ken concocted this blower by cutting a flap in a trashcan and fitting the end of it with a fan.

His team hauled the airplanes and the blowers to Jen in a trailer, hoisting them up the side of the building and onto the library’s roof with a pulley system. They fixed seven of the improvised air cannons on top of Jen and three on top of Trustees Theater.

Ken with his nifty air cannons awaiting the signal to release the paper airplanes.

Upon receiving the signal, to the tune of “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz, the crew dumped the bags of planes into the blowers, like elves on Christmas morning delivering wonder and awe.

Next year, or ten years from now, when the planes trigger a memory about Savannah Film Festival 2013, I hope you’ll remember Ken and his team, too.

My favorite part of any magazine is a few pages in, the story behind the cover photo. I always want to know what the photographer was thinking.

If the Savannah Film Festival had a magazine, its cover would be by Adam Kuehl (B.F.A., Photography), and he was good enough to indulge my curiosities about what’s happening in the portraits he took to commemorate the 15th annual Savannah Film Festival.

Adam has been photographing festival honorees since 2007. While the cinefiles attend screenings and panels, tucked out of the way in an unremarkable room, Adam and his subjects – Hollywood’s most intriguing actors and filmmakers – make some remarkable photographs.

On the eve of Savannah Film Festival 2013, as Adam prepares to create another round one-of-a-kind images, here are his iconic portraits of Savannah College of Art and Design’s honored guests of 2012. Adam’s signature aesthetic is the interaction he inspires between his subjects and artwork by students and alumni in these scenes styled by Amy Zurcher.

Actor James Gandolfini: 

“James had a lot of fun with Marcus Kenney's work. He did one formal photo, then I think the atmosphere of Savannah combined with Halloween gave him the idea to pretend the bull was a mask.”

Actress Diane Lane:

“Diane is a pro who knows her angles very well. We shot this portrait in nine frames.” “Rose Mirror” by Rachel Evans. Necklace by Sam Norgard.

Actor Matt Dillon:

“We've used the same conference room for over two dozen portraits, so new lighting setups have become more and more difficult. Luckily, I found a perforated trashcan cylinder in the green room the day before. We stuck a strobe in the middle of it with gaffers tape to create the honeycomb effect. “Space” by Russ Noto. Busts by Michael Porten. Bench by John McMahon.

Actress Gabourey Sidibe:

“Gaby was really playful with the camera.  She has pure confidence.” Silk scarves by Kate de Para.

Check out more of Adam's portraits here.

Savannah College of Art and Design is no stranger to the movie industry. Every year, filmmakers flock to the historic Trustees Theater for the annual Savannah Film Festival (Oct. 26-Nov. 2). In the case of “SpongeBob SquarePants 2,” though, SCAD’s not showing the movie, it’s in it.

Paramount location manager Laura Bryant approached SCAD in August about shooting the sequel to 2004’s “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” at Jen Library and Trustees, a landmark situated on Broughton Street in downtown Savannah.

Once SCAD gave the green light, the studio’s art department transformed Jen and Trustees into staples of the fictional beach town of Salty Shoals, where SpongeBob – the eternally optimistic animated sea sponge - will make his debut on land through a mix of animation and live action. For shooting, which will continue for several weeks, the marquee at Trustees advertises the Salty Shoals Ocean Reef Festival and Jen serves as the Salty Shoals Museum.

Jen is still open to students during filming and offers a front row seat to the action: SpongeBob and friends using their powers to battle a menacing pirate, played by actor Antonio Banderas.

The enduring “SCAD” letters atop Trustees remain untouched. So look for a cameo when the movie premieres in February 2015.

In the meantime, rumor has it that SpongeBob is looking for a new pineapple to rent in the historic district.

Everyone likes balloons at a party. In the case of installation artist Jason Hackenwerth’s (M.F.A., Painting) buoyant sculptures, balloons are the party. Miami’s Art Basel, New York’s Guggenheim and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum have hosted Hackenwerth's stunning creations. Last night, he debuted his work in Atlanta at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

The city’s botanical gardens have exhibited Dale Chihuly’s blown glass sculptures but, floating from the sky, Hackenwerth's similar sea-like behemoth made those reveling beneath it feel as though they were sitting on the bottom of a prehistoric ocean. It’s safe to say those in its shadow hadn’t seen anything like Hegemonster’s blue-green glow, which emanated from the terrace above Peachtree Street at SCAD Atlanta. Eighteen feet tall and 21 feet in diameter, Hackenwerth's sculpture was the envy of Midtown’s rooftops.

In the exclusive one-night showing, Hackenwerth unveiled Hegemonster high over the heads of giants of a different kind: captains of interior design and architecture who gathered to celebrate the School of Buildings Arts’ most recent honors.

For the second year in a row, DesignIntelligence ranked SCAD the No. 1 interior design program in its list of “America’s Best Architecture and Design Schools.” This summer, SCAD’s Master of Architecture program became the first in Georgia, and one of the first in the U.S., to earn the new maximum eight-year term of reaccreditation by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB).

Jason Hackenwerth with his installation

Throughout the reception Hegemonster’s audience couldn’t take their eyes off the otherworldly form. In a nod to the company he kept, Hackenwerth reflected on the sculpture’s construction and the design cues it takes from his alma mater.

“This towering sculpture stands on four strong legs which support a cavernous form,” he noted. “These four legs could be compared to SCAD's four campuses and the supported body, the limitless potential of the students that come to SCAD to begin their careers."

Just like his sculptures, Hackenwerth keeps rising to the occasion.

Atlanta, Hong Kong, and Savannah are abuzz with the fresh energy of the class of 2017, new transfer and graduate students. SCAD’s 35th anniversary, to be celebrated throughout the year, loomed large over all orientation activities. In some places quite literally.

In Savannah, a huge 35 was projected on the wall of the Civic Center, symbolically replenishing itself with the faces of 2,400 new design denizens. Inside the arena new students, representing 49 states and more than 100 countries, listened as President Wallace recounted some of the iconic brands on which alumni have made their mark, such as Starbucks, Rolling Stone, Vera Wang, and Coke.

Michael Mack (B.F.A., Industrial Design) used his story of launching Michael Grey Footwear to encourage the crowd that their coursework and faculty can guide them to their dream careers: “Ask questions, work hard, keep an open mind and you’ll see your dreams come true.” 

The air-conditioned welcome was a much needed break from the late summer heat, which greeted students as they moved in and made merry in the shadow of a double decker bus and oversized photo of the 80 students who comprised SCAD’s very first class.

In Atlanta, alumna Feifei Sun (B.F.A., Advertising) told 500 incoming students that her best memories of SCAD are the “real-life experiences woven through every stage of my academic development.” Formerly of Time magazine, Feifei previewed her new website “Making It Atlanta,” where she’ll profile the city’s dynamic professionals. “I’ll be writing about some of you,” she predicted.

Among the ranks of SCAD Hong Kong’s 150 incoming students is interior design student Johnny Cheung Joy-lai, one of the newest members of Hong Kong’s Cycling Team. Orientation speaker senior Alfred Lee told Joy-lai and the others that he credits SCAD Hong Kong’s tight-knit community with the success he’s had, like winning the Disney Imaginations competition.

“The campus size and the student events will allow you to meet and learn from one another. I encourage each of you to be extremely motivated during your time here and take advantage of all the opportunities that SCAD provides,” Lee said.

SCAD Hong Kong’s newest students also participated in the 35th anniversary kick-off celebration, answering the question, “Where do you see yourself at 35?”