Kim will be making three appearances at Arts First on Saturday, playing viola with a pair of quartets and violin with a third.

—Michael A. Mohammed

DUNCAN A. JOHNSON ’05

To hear Duncan A. Johnson ’05 tell it, it was an imaginary dinosaur that convinced him he wanted to spend his life making movies.

“I saw ‘Jurassic Park’ when I was 10,” the Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) concentrator says. “I was crying through the whole movie, but when it was done, I thought, ‘this is what I have to do.’”

So Johnson bought a camcorder, assembled his friends, and never looked back. He came to Harvard intent on studying film production; he would have chosen another school if Harvard hadn’t had the VES department.

Rather than cutting straight to filmmaking, Johnson spent his first year studying photography. He describes the “terribly rude awakening” of laying out all his semester’s photographs in front of his professor, only to have the professor trash every last one of them. Johnson went back to work, taking a thousand photographs over the last three weeks of the semester and ending up with ten he considered usable.

“It was like boot camp really,” he says of the ordeal. “It was scary at the time, but experiences like those really made me want to do it more in the end. It really inspired me and showed me the level of dedication this sort of work takes. You can never half-ass it.”

Johnson demonstrated that newfound dedication his junior year, when he wrote, shot, and edited a fifteen-minute film, “Junior Achiever,” the work of which he is most proud. “Last year was such a positive experience,” he says. “I was very happy with my film, very proud of it, and I got a very good reception for it.”

In “Junior Achiever,” a teenage slacker’s mom hires a lifestyle coach to get him out of the house. When she ends up sleeping with the coach, hilarity ensues. The film, like most of Johnson’s work at Harvard, is about his life and friends in South Texas, appealing to the same type of stoner ethos found in his favorite movie, “The Big Lebowski.”

As one of only a handful of film production concentrators, Johnson relished the opportunity to work closely with faculty members like former Visiting Professor in the VES department Hal Hartley, who taught Johnson to conquer his instinct to over-think his filmmaking, an instinct he calls the “smart-guy, Harvard syndrome.”

“He taught me that filmmaking is just like construction work, just like building a house,” Johnson says. “It’s a business with materials, deadlines, budgets, and so it’s not just the director catching inspiration. It’s the director busting his ass to get it in on time.”

Johnson is also a four-year classical DJ on WHRB, and his final show last Wednesday was a bittersweet reminder that his time at Harvard is almost up. Though he hasn’t finalized his plans for next year, he says he’d like to be a production assistant in New York or a director’s apprentice.

Johnson’s plans further down the road are more distinct: in fifteen years, he hopes to have a few feature films under his belt, with funding to do another one. “I want to be the next Hal Hartley,” he says. “Never made an Oscar, never made a ton of money at the box office. But he’s doing it how he wants to do it and getting by that way, so that’s how I see myself.” Until then, Johnson contents himself with the wonderful prospects of niche fame—no computer-animated dinosaurs allowed.

—Daniel J. Mandel