One of the oversized monitors at Jacques Mersereau's desk streams a live feed from cameras in the video studio next to his editing room, and the other plays a loop of student and faculty projects. The patch bays, the speakers, the toolboxes and the wide desk in front of him are all black, and his parrot-patterned Hawaiian shirt lights up the room.

As the producing manager of the Digital Media Commons Video Studio in the Duderstadt Library, Mersereau spends his workday helping students and faculty with video projects of all kinds.

"Art on the chopping block"

"People come in and are putting their art and ideas on the chopping block. That's their baby, and there's an incredible amount of stress and tension, so I try to have the 'aloha' spirit. Part of my job is just coming in and having a goofy shirt on and smiling," Mersereau says of the 40-plus Hawaiian shirts he owns.

The video studio can be booked by anyone in the university community. "Because we are part of the library, it doesn't matter who you are as long as you have a UMich email address," says Mersereau.

The studio's and Digital Media Commons' offerings include a motion-capture system with ball suits (to make 3-D characters), a dance floor, green screens, and thousands of dollars' worth of lights and projectors.

"The Video Studio takes the U of M's creative community's ideas and turns them into something they can share with the world," Mersereau says.

A senior in the Stamps School of Art and Design utilized the video studio to put together a video diorama about her parents coming to America, which went on to win "best experimental film" at a film festival in Toronto, Canada.

Many of the students who use the space are working on a big project for the first time. Mersereau and the Video Studio team help push them to produce their best work.

"It's really hard to make a living in art or writing or music. I've done it for many, many years, and it's important to help people who have that passion. To give them as much of a leg up as we can," he says.

Documentary filmmaking projects

Mersereau released his own film in 2005, a documentary about Kensington Park's osprey reintroduction project. He and his wife, Christi Vedejs, wrote, filmed and edited the movie, which won a Michigan Emmy for best cinematography. "It was very arduous and long process with and a lot of nail biting and we spent a lot of money, but we wanted people to love the birds like we did."

He and Christi hope to work together on another nature documentary.

Jacques and Christi met in Ann Arbor as undergraduates; she was a Big Ten champion swimmer and he was doing sound at Rick's American Café, where she was celebrating with friends. "Meeting her was one of the best things that ever came out of Rick's," Mersereau remembers, smiling.

Christi, a freelance cinematographer and writer, worked for Arts on Earth in 2008 as the cinematographer and video designer for the project "Mapping the River." In addition to providing projection and audio/video support at the Power Center and for SRSLY, a Chelsea-based community foundation, Christi also coaches private one-on-one swim lessons. She and Jacques are currently co-authoring a novel based on Jacques's screenplay, "Evil Exists."

Portions of this story were written by Katherine Plumhoff and appeared in the March 31, 2014 edition of The University Record.