News

Confronting a global pandemic wasn’t part of the MAPS action plan for 2020. Just a year ago, MAPS Media Institute was celebrating a significant milestone, looking forward to growth in new directions and expanding their award-winning program to students statewide. 2019 marked MAPS 16th year of providing intensive, free-of-charge after-school and summer media-arts classes for…

Congrats to the fledgling filmmakers from Helena and Harlem who received regional Emmy Awards from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS). During an online ceremony live-streamed from NATAS NW headquarters in Seattle on Saturday, June 6, officials announced that both “Looking Forward From Yesterday” (Short Form Non-Fiction) and “EAST” (Short Form Fiction)…

Montana is making a splash when it comes to high school student filmmaking. One year after earning three regional production awards—and one highly coveted national award—from NATAS (the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, known more widely as the group behind the Emmy Awards), students of the Montana-based MAPS Media Institute have taken home…

MAPS Media Institute will shift exclusively to an online format for its summer 2020 courses, a natural move for an organization that teaches media arts. The entire curriculum will remain free of charge, and for the first time, MAPS will open select summer classes to all eighth- through 12th-grade students statewide. The move comes in…

A number of Harlem High School students have come together in an extracurricular group, Milk River Productions, for the past couple of years making student films, most recently releasing the film “Looking Forward From Yesterday.” A documentary made by a group of Harlem High School students is on its way to two film festivals. “Looking…

Tonight, at 6:30 p.m. at the Hays/Lodge Pole High School, there will be a screening of the award-winning film Looking Forward From Yesterday: Fighting for Our Culture produced by Harlem High School students with generous support from Harlem High School, Montana Gear Up, MAPS Media Institute, and the Greater Montana Foundation. The documentary film will…

The film “A Day to Remember,” created by students in the Lake County MAPS Media Institute program, has been selected to screen at the eighth annual Flathead Lake International Cinemafest this week. MAPS is a free-of-charge media arts program that serves students in grades 8 to 12. Classes include graphic design, music production, new technologies…

Ordinarily, news of a couple of Montana-made films’ acceptance to a Montana film festival might not be so newsworthy. But when the films were created by students of two different Indian reservations under the auspices of an award-winning media arts program, and when the festival is the largest of its kind in the American West…

A chance for students to use state-of-the-art Apple iMacs and software and take classes in filmmaking and graphic design — all at no cost. Hard to believe — but it’s true. MAPS — Lewis & Clark County just opened the doors of its new media lab in the Holter Museum of Art, and it’s ready…

They’re 140 miles apart and from two different areas of the creative spectrum, but Browning High School’s poetry club and the Art for Survival group at Helena’s Holter Museum of Art have a lot in common. Both groups serve high school students by helping them find creative expression. Both groups hosted the MAPS Media Institute…