She had to draw a new poster for the Kung Fu movie “House of Flying Daggers” … and somehow incorporate Chicken McNuggets in it.
Needless to say, this wasn’t what Casey expected at all.
 C2 interns, from left, Elaine Casey, Zoe Galle and Jill Lorack present posters they created for their favorite movies '€“ as if those movies were rereleased 20 years in the future. |
Casey said she made it work somehow by sketching out the film’s actors and then drawing in chicken nuggets in the background — sort of like the golden pillars of the Forbidden City in China, except now they were fried, crispy pillars.
That first assignment was a test for Casey and her four fellow interns — all of them Half Moon Bay High School students working at C2, an award-winning professional design firm on the Coastside. That first-day project was an attempt to get the five interns to stretch their creativity by taking completely unrelated things and creating a bridge between them.
C2 has been employing Casey and her classmates in internships this school year, setting them on an early path to learn the ins and outs of professional creative design.
Meeting together once a week, the interns are working on and refining projects and ideas, meeting consistent deadlines, and learning to “think wrong” — C2’s own mantra for taking a unique approach to developing ideas outside the box.
“It’s mostly for them to understand the design company, and what we do,” said C2 co-founder Greg Galle, himself a Half Moon Bay High alumnus. “That basic stuff is really helpful for them, and opens up what they can do with their careers.”
The idea to employ interns started when Galle came to the high school two years ago on open studio night to talk with the students in teacher Larkin Evans’ art class.
Evans remembers hearing Galle mention that his company was pondering hiring interns at its new Princeton office.
“That pricked my interest — that meant he wasn’t just jumping into this on a whim,” Evans said. “We’re lucky to have this. It’s unusual to have someone of C2’s caliber in our own backyard.”
Evans encouraged her students to apply for the internship. Last year, five interns worked for half a year at the company, helping the staff and starting their own creative projects, such as designing new logos for the Girl Scouts, sports teams, and local schools.
“Design seems like it’d be simple, but it’s actually really difficult,” Evans said. “Going through that process to make any product, image or word we see interesting… that’s something you have to learn how to do.”
Galle explains that opening up his company to young maturing talent has been an ongoing project at C2 for the last several years. The company has a longstanding “Project M” internship, which takes recent college graduates under the company’s collective wing and focuses them to use their artistic skills toward community projects.
Galle says that past Project M interns have helped design fundraising material to save the Costa Rican rainforest, preserve open space in inner-city Baltimore, and provide essential services to impoverished areas of Alabama.
“They’re creating interest so people find the time and money to donate,” Galle said. “Often, they’re working with already existing organizations.”
He explains that hiring teenagers often is a win-win situation. The students get a unique opportunity to work in an artistic industry that often is extremely difficult to break into. In trade, C2 gets a team of enthused and energetic young people, who often can inject original insight into projects.
“There’s not a lot of opportunity for artistic kids,” Galle said. “Even though Half Moon Bay has a surprising number of creative firms and businesses, it’s hard for kids to have access to that.”
Galle and his associates are quick to note that the interns also have to do a bit of grunt work — moving things around, organizing the library, and doing quick research and Web searches. C2 Strategist Marianne Murray, who coordinates the interns, says that early on, many of the interns simply need to learn the basics of professional discipline and meeting deadlines. Murray says that the interns were encouraged to collaborate on their own community project, which is starting to coalesce into an elaborate high school art fair with the working name, “Art Day.”
“Yeah, it’s a little nebulous right now,” Murray said. “We’re thinking along the lines of how we have the most impact, how do we make this sustainable?”
Meeting Friday after school to discuss their project, Casey and the others gathered in a huge open workroom of C2 offices to brainstorm what Art Day should feature. The teenagers sat around a long series of paper-covered tables that were pushed together, making a long improvised boardroom table.
“I’m envisioning something Exploratorium-like, but for art …,” said Ian Zell, a high school junior, who moments later landed on what he was dreaming up. “I want to make a sculpture and have kids smash it up, and then it could be put back together,”
“I really like that idea, I really want to do that,” added senior Zoe Galle excitedly, writing down the proposal in her notebook.
After the meeting, Casey said they were still in a conceptual stage for what they wanted to include in Art Day, which may debut sometime this school year.
“We’re starting to make progress,” she said. “It’s great to think that what we’re doing could really happen, it could actually help out the community.”
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