Students from Lee Emmert’s Media Production III class have partnered with faculty and graduate student researchers from the School of the Environment to produce short documentaries. Their work serves a dual purpose: giving students hands-on experience with film-making tools and techniques and documenting the critical work the School of the Environment does for Idahoans.

The opportunity was first made available in the Spring 2024 semester, after Emmert, who has a background making documentaries with the U.S. Forest Service and other environmental organizations, connected with Jen Cruz, an assistant professor of population ecology.

“She and I started talking about working on a project for her lab,” Emmert said. “When I told my students about it, everybody was just super excited by the idea of joining these scientists and grad students out in the field in these beautiful remote destinations.”

The pilot project in Spring 2024 was a success. Media students Elijah Zeller (Integrated Media and Strategic Communications, ’26) and Gillian Simcoe (Integrated Media and Strategic Communications, ’25) took Emmert’s class in Fall 2024, when the partnership with the School of the Environment was in full swing.

“I was excited to have an opportunity to do a project with field work out in the snow,” Zeller said, describing his time with HP Marshall’s CryoGARS team, which measures snowpack levels in Idaho’s mountains.

For Simcoe, who documented a team of Boise State researchers studying the fallout of the 2024 Wapiti Fire, there was a personal connection.

“I grew up in the Stanley and Grandjean area,” she said. “My dad was a part of a forest trail crew based out of Grand Jean in the 1980s, and I river raft all the time in that area. So to me it was a really important thing to tell from a person who uses that area recreationally.”

Simcoe, Zeller and other students who worked on the project brought their passion to bear under Emmert’s direction. The end result was a practical learning opportunity across all the roles and responsibilities of a professional documentary team, including film editing, cinematography and directing.

Along the way, they dealt with the unpredictability of field work. Zeller recalled one instance where he encountered a still-smoking section of forest from the fires earlier in the year. “With a camera on one hand and my glove full of snow in the other, I went around putting snow on the embers while trying to keep my camera safe and not get a bunch of dust in the lens.”

These experiences are critical for students aiming for professional media careers. As a clinical assistant professor, Emmert brings his own experience as a documentary filmmaker into the classroom.

“There can be this real ‘hurry up and wait’ dynamic,” he said. Just like professional documentarians, the students were beholden to their subjects’ schedules. 

For Simcoe and her team, that meant getting up into the area affected by the Wapiti fire early, before the snow started coming down around Grandjean. “With my project, we immediately had to go out and get b-roll.”

For Zeller, it was the opposite. “We got the pre-production documents and everything from Professor Emmert, which was good for us to be able to identify the focus of the story, but in a sense we were flying blind because we didn’t have anything tangible to go off of. We were waiting for Marshall and the team to go on their first snow expedition.”

The media production students left with a rich set of project-based learning experiences and their names in the credits for these high-quality documentaries, but they weren’t the only ones to benefit. This was also a unique opportunity for environmental researchers at Boise State to share their work.

“It’s an honor to work with these media students and get their help sharing our faculty’s excellent research projects,” said School of the Environment Director Kevin Feris. “The School of the Environment was founded on collaboration, and that spirit carries across the university.”

This partnership between media students and environmental researchers is just getting started. The next class of students is currently working on their documentaries, which will be available to the Boise State community this summer.