Paul Hillman films fur seals on Alaska's Pribiliof Islands as part of his master's course work in the Science and Natural History Filmmaking program. Photo by Paul Hillman Fur, footage and serious science ... by Jean Arthur The snarling roar of bull fur seals greets Paul Hillman while he works on a course project. The MSU graduate student in Science and Natural History Filmmaking sets up a hi-definition video camera in a blind on an island, 200 miles off Alaska's mainland. Hoarse barking drowns out a cadenced score of rushing waves. "From many places on the Pribiliof Islands, even in the villages, you can hear the bulls," says Hillman who is completing his Masters of Fine Arts thesis, a documentary film on northern fur seals. "Those constant bellows are between males as they compete with each other for territories on the beach, and therefore, the rights to the females." Hillman is one of two soon-to-be first graduates of the Science/Natural History Filmmaking program. The other MFA candidate, Brooke Buttgen, is spending the summer in California finishing a parallel project. She explores the fur seals' existence from an historic angle. "My thesis film is on a naturalist, Henry Wood Elliott, a U.S. Treasury agent who spent his life working to save the northern fur seal from extinction," says Buttgen. "Elliott's story dates back to the purchase of Alaska in 1867. The United States began slaughtering fur seals for their pelts by the tens of thousands while other countries hunted the seal on the high seas. The U.S. tried to block other nations from harvesting fur seals (an industry worth millions), touching off a half-century political battle that put wildlife conservation at the forefront of international relations." Northern fur seals, which once numbered more than two million on the Pribilof Islands, fell to near extinction in the early 1900s, then recovered and declined again to a current population of about 700,000. Like Hillman's 30-minute production which explores the current fur seal decline, Buttgen's project, "Slaughter in the Bering Sea: Henry Wood Elliott in the Pribilof Islands," will become a chapter in a longer historical documentary about the Pribiliof Islands produced by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The two MFA candidates were among the MSU Department of Media and Theatre Arts' first class of 20 students in Science/Natural History Filmmaking. Headed by Ronald Tobias, media professor, the program partnered with the Discovery Channel and Sony three years ago. Tobias sought to address the challenges of communicating science and technology to the public by teaching students with science and engineering degrees how to create films, and teaching science to students with film experience. "With the advent of serious, in-depth science programming on television as opposed to the pseudo-science and gee-whiz science that had predominated, I felt it was important to have people who have backgrounds in science and engineering make the films about science and engineering," says Tobias. MSU's is the first program in the world that is designed to educate in both film and video production in the language and methodology of science research and the study and conservation of natural resources, Tobias said. As part of the rigorous 60-credit-hour curriculum, students are filming on nearly every continent. One student documents medicinal properties of peppers in South America. Another explores signs of life on Mars. Others film stream restoration in Mongolia, leopards in India, bears in the Gobi Desert and coyotes in Yellowstone. Passports are inked from Easter Island, Australia, India, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Argentina and Syria. In the program's most renowned success, student filmmaker John Shier documented DNA research on grizzly bears in Glacier National Park and won an Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2003 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival. Students work with federal and private organizations to fund their projects, which cost up to $100,000 to produce. Benefactors include NASA, National Science Foundation, NOAA, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, National Park Service, World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club, Wildlife Conservation Society and others. "The entire natural history industry knows about the MSU Science/Natural History Filmmaking program," says Tobias.