FAIRMONT — An Intro to Film Studies class will be offered at Fairmont High School next semester, taught by English teacher Jonas Nissen.

He is in his fourth year of teaching at Fairmont High School, but has many years of experience. He worked with the video production program for 10 years at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato.

Nissen explained he was hired at Bethany as a theater professor, as he holds a Ph.D. in theater. The college did not have broadcasting at the time. Once a program began, they thought Nissen would be the right fit to facilitate it.

“There’s a lot of overlap between theater and film and I gravitated toward the video production and developed a lot of experience there,” Nissen said.

Last school year, he wanted to get a program started in which student writing would be published online, so he spoke about it with administrators.

“From that we branched out into, ‘Do we stop at writing? Why don’t we do pictures of art and photography, music and videos?’ So now that’s been set aside and we’re focusing on the video, which could easily branch back into the other areas,” Nissen said.

“This class is really the first step toward a larger program that we hope to develop. That’s a program on video and media production.”

In Intro to Film, Nissen will not teach production, camera or lights, but the study of film. From there they will go into producing it.

“This is the first step of a journey and it’s exciting to take the first step, but it’s also exciting to see what’s coming after,” he said.

The course will be offered for college credit through Minnesota West and for high school credit in the hopes that it will reach a variety of students. As Nissen said, everyone can learn something from the class, which is really about media literacy, how media works and how messages are sent and received through media.

While the class has not yet begun, students have already expressed an interest, according to responses to a survey Nissen sent out a survey to juniors and seniors.

The class begins in late January, but an audio visual club was started at Fairmont High School just a few months ago. Nissen shad plans to create one, but before he could do so several students came to him asking him to be an adviser for the club.

“Our goal is to watch, enjoy and celebrate good film-making,” Nissen said.

About a dozen students meet once per week, though Nissen believes many students are not yet aware of it. He hopes the film class will help.

Nissen is most looking forward to having conversations with students in the class.

“I think it could be a great discussion-based class,” he said. “We already branch out into these discussions in my English classes. When I’m trying to illustrate a point for a story, I usually use a movie or a TV show. That’s our common ground. If that’s our common ground, that tells you the importance of film in our culture.”

He also said that in this generation, students cannot just be consumers of media, but need to be able to produce it themselves.

“I see a lot of potential, I see students making films, making commercials and webcasts,” Nissen said. “We would like to see students broadcasting all of our sports happening in the school and concerts in the auditorium. We don’t want to shy away from anything. We see a lot of possibilities and it’s student interest that’s going to take us there.”