“The Details,” starring Tobey Maguire, premiered for UC Santa Cruz students on Oct. 4 in the Media Theater. Following the showing of his new film, Estes engaged the audience in a Q&A where he delved deeper into the story of being an adult — both on and off-screen. That journey, for Estes, began here at UCSC, where he began to envision his multifaceted career as a director, writer and producer.

The following questions were posed by audience members who attended the screening.

Q: When you were first starting out as a director and screenwriter, breaking into the film business, what is one thing you wish you had known?

Jacob Aaron Estes: “My playwriting teacher [Jim Bierman] here said if I could, I should quit writing … he had tried to quit writing 10 times but he couldn’t stop himself, so, that was the only reason to be a writer. [Laughs] I’ve always remembered that conversation … The one thing I would say is you have to go forward, you just have to go as hard as humanly possible … and each opportunity that you have to get better at [your craft], you seize that.”

Q: In your various creative undertakings, like writing, screenplays, directing [movies] and editing them, do you ever feel they’re really finished, or at some point do you just have to abandon them?

Estes: “No, not really. But you have to let things go at some point. You have to just stop and say enough of this, I’ve turned over every single stone that I can turn over, and I’ve asked every single person I know to advise me. It’s not going to get much better than this.”

Q: How involved are you with the storyboard and/or shot list with your Director of Photography?

Estes: “[I’m involved in] everything. Once we have the money secured, we sit down and literally will spend two to three months in my office, my backyard, or wherever, fantasizing about what it should feel like and how to create a visual art to the story … it’s very planned out, but in a sense, the reason why great jazz feels good because there’s all this preparation beforehand and you can improvise around themes … because what happens on set is you’ve got Tobey Maguire and Laura Linney, and you were expecting them to do this but they do that, and so these visual ideas that you had sitting around three or four months ago, you have to reimagine them and not try to destroy the energy the actors are bringing to you … so all that preparation really pays off.”

Q: You mentioned the movie was very chaotic and there were a lot of surprises on the way, and yet there is an intuition about the structure and the way the story unfolds. How did you come to reach that resolution at the end, where life just goes on?

Estes: “I think that was the only natural resolution for me. I’m never very interested in actual justice … I like a lot of moral ambiguity in my material, and the challenge of making people deal with that.”

Q: In the period after your education and before you actually achieved success, when you were writing all the time, was there ever a point where you thought you couldn’t write anymore? If there was, how did you get beyond it?

Estes: “Yes, and it was three weeks ago, and it was six months ago, and two years ago … and then something occurs to me and I just start trying … you really can’t write anything until you sit down and actually write … the only cure is to exercise that muscle as much as humanly possible. That’s how I have to deal with it, and then maybe I’ll just write 10 pages of nonsense that day, but at least I feel like I tried and that helps me break through.”

Q: Concerning the story itself, from a raccoon just popping into the backyard to these dire, strange, and humorous circumstances … where did you pull all of these events together?

Estes: “There’s not a clear answer to that, but I can tell you I just kept trying to lose myself and top myself and make it more and more of unraveling of events … It was just this weird, organic process of figuring it out as I went along. I can’t say that I structured the story from the get go. I just got lucky.”

Jody Alexander's book making and paper art studio. Photo by Rosanna van Straten

Located where Highway 17 spits cars out into the city of Santa Cruz, the Tannery Arts Center resembles a gateway, a picture of what the Santa Cruz art community stands for.

Phase two of the Tannery Arts Center has just been completed — the Creative Arts Center — leaving it with only one phase left to reach its final vision.

In a written statement, Santa Cruz mayor Don Lane remarked on the importance of the Tannery expansion.

“The arts community is such an integral part of Santa Cruz, bolstering both our cultural life and economic vitality,” Lane said. “With the Tannery Arts Center’s expansion, we continue to demonstrate why Santa Cruz is recognized around the country as a true Mecca for the arts.”

Tannery Arts Center executive director Rachel Goodman said the opening of the new studios is a major milestone in the history of the center, which aims to provide an affordable studio and housing community for artists.

The grand opening will take place this Friday at 4:30 p.m. and will continue until midnight.

While phase one provided living and working spaces for artists, the 30 studios built in phase two allow artists to create work and show it in the same space, combining creative and business aspects. Phase three will be the completion of the performing arts center.

The studios will host a wide range of artists and their media, including printmaking, jewelry making, painting, dance, framing, photography and glassblowing. These new studios are the best way to bring work to the public, Goodman said.

“It’s really the first part of the Tannery that’s fully public, where artists have their doors open, with lots of open studio space,” Goodman said.

Goodman said a big part of making the Tannery a more public space would include making it more accessible to students and postgraduates. She said she sees great potential for collaboration between the university and the Tannery.

Rebecca Goldman is managing editor of Catamaran Literary Review, a quarterly magazine that will be publishing poetry, fiction, nonfiction and art from one of the new Tannery studios. She said she is looking forward to working with students.

“I see the Tannery as a great post-education career-building space,” Goldman said. “We will definitely be looking for interns, come next fall.”

Jody Alexander, owner of bookmaking and paper arts studio Wishi Washi, which has now moved into one of the new studios, said she loves the feeling of community the new artist workplace provides.

“It’s the biggest space I’ve had to work in,” Alexander said.

She gives workshops in paper arts — staining and marbling paper — and book binding, often to UCSC students. Alexander said a collaboration between the UC and the Tannery could foster strong work.

“I taught at [UC Santa Cruz],” Alexander said. “The students always pushed at what they could do and what they thought was possible, and I loved that — always trying new things. UCSC’s student body really pushes and challenges.”

“Game/Reality Workshops,” led and designed by Heather Lee Logas, is a participatory game-making event that promotes thinking of new realities. Photo by Sarah Manley.

Make a game about walking at sunset. Play it. Achieve the perfect sunset and score points if your experience includes: good company, beers and burritos, clear skies, an awesome dog and witnessing the green flash. Take steps back and lose points if: it starts raining, you encounter noise pollution, you get hurt or you step in dog poo.

This is “Game/Reality Workshops” by Heather Lee Logas. It is just one of the many interactive projects UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) “I’ve Got Something on Your Mind” exhibition attendees can participate in.

Logas’ live art game-making workshop is meant to encourage communities to envision new realities through game creation.

Participants pick a topic, construct rules and create a space for their own game. Each piece in the exhibition pushes the minds of the audience — each in its own way — in a new, positive and self-evaluating direction.

“I’ve Got Something on Your Mind” presents a wide range of digital media work by 11 DANM Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate students. The title represents the alternate space that is created in the Digital Arts and Resource Center (DARC).

“This phrase points to something flummoxing, bemusing, impossible — like a short-circuit in logic that happens when one tries to simultaneously hold two contradictory thoughts in one’s mind,” curator Soraya Murray said in a statement.

This is not to say, however, that the artists are not asking vital questions about our daily lives’ increasing alienation.

Each piece invites the audience to think consciously and carefully about their relationship with themselves, how they interact with one another and how they function in their bodies, creating a dynamic mental interaction between the audience and the artwork.

Logas’ “Game/Reality Workshops” probes at these questions, as do other pieces, by perhas more subtly asking the participants to reflect on themselves. Those seen exploring the exhibition walk slowly, seemingly absorbing all that the pieces have to teach them.

Almost every piece encourages the audience to become a participant rather than a spectator. Natalie McKeever’s “Internal Worlds” explores the way we perceive ourselves as human beings by measuring a participant’s pulse with a biosensor helmet. The heartbeat is then externalized in a lightshow synchronized with the participant’s pulse, and the heartbeat of another species is played back in cadence with that of the participant. Experiencing the rhythm of another creature alongside their own, the participants become hyper-aware of their own bodies.

Even the non-participatory pieces, like Jolie Ruelle’s stop-motion animation “The Loop,” allow the audience to question and feel. We watch the main character get more entangled in abstract fears, dealing with anxiety in a cycle of avoidance that perpetuates and feeds itself. As the main character is exposed to her habits, the viewer automatically turns inward, questioning what it is they fear. Reconsidering their own thinking patterns as she does, those leaving the small viewing room leave with a deep sense of introspection.

Ruelle’s artist statement said, “Risk-management is being offered in every outlet of our daily lives. The question is: Do we feel any safer? … At what point is our desire for control actually controlling us, and at what cost?”

The artists invite us to think carefully through visual and auditory stimuli, and to question the systems around us and how they make us feel and function. By putting the audience in almost uncomfortable positions, and by confronting them with themselves, this year’s artists reach them in a new and intimate, but wonderful way. “I’ve Got Something on Your Mind” fills in the gap between artist and audience.

The mood was calm but minds were stimulated at the first weekend of the exhibition. People filled the DARC, yet they wandered around as if in a trance, each in their own world, dubbing the exhibition’s title even more appropriate. It’s as if the 11 artists really do have something on our minds.

Scott McCloud, renowned artist and author of numerous books, including “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,” will speak as part of the Art, Technology and Culture Lecture Series on Friday at the DARC at 4 p.m., followed by a reception with the artists from 5:30–8:30 p.m.

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

I dutifully work through 10-page articles about foreign aid agencies, get lost in short stories that I forget are actually fictitious, read about uptown gallery openings that I will never be cool enough to go to, and smile at the subtle yet smug humor of its famous cartoons.

My affinity for The New Yorker is indicative of a particular attitude of mine. The belief that yes, technology is great, but no, I don’t need any more of it in my life. Often, it makes me feel like somewhat of a luddite, putting me at odds with my more tech-savvy peers.

But there’s something about my New Yorker exercise that brings me a kind of satisfaction that cannot be replicated in any other format. Turning the text-laden pages with the knowledge that I really should be reading for a class, wiping the crumbs off the page as I eat my burned toast, and, most of all, reveling in the unmistakable pleasure of taking the time to read something that’s actually in print.

Yes, I use Gmail and Facebook, and I’ve gained an unquantifiable amount of knowledge from the Google search box. I am aware of the incredible impact that the Internet has had on my social developmental and educational life, as well as my status as what my father calls a “digital native.” But no, I don’t like it when my friends are searching something on their iPhone while we’re having a conversation, I don’t want to know every thought that exits in your head via Twitter, and I do think it’s sad that an over-reliance on spell-check has diminished my peers’ ability to spell words like “conscientious” and “maintenance.”

It’s not surprising that our generation has developed this dependency on technology, as it echoes the consumer culture we grew up in.This idea — that more is more, bigger is better and instant gratification trumps delayed satisfaction — reigns supreme. But with this ever-increasing stream of global data, we’re simultaneously losing some things: a familiarity and appreciation for simpler pleasures, an awareness of local knowledge, and perhaps even a portion of our common sense.

It’s not that there isn’t room for both the print and digital media in the modern world. The quality of a piece of journalism remains intact regardless of the format. But technology’s offer of unlimited options and immediate access to any publication or information source doesn’t supersede the value of reading something in print. There is a tactile and time-tested value attached to this activity that technology simply can’t replace.

When was the last time you used intuition and a good sense of direction to find your way around or talked to a living, breathing librarian while researching a paper? How about taking the time to write a note to send to a friend, or making yourself unreachable for an entire day? These activities may seem blasé in a world of e-mails, tweets and apps, but they’re all things that have been done by human beings long before there was a place known as Silicon Valley.

Technological progress is good. I am not advocating a life of Internet abstinence or a reliance on the Dewey Decimal System for all of our informational needs. But the benefits we accrue from these technologies are not unlimited. There is a point at which one more iPhone app that calculates the number of steps until your next latte is not making your life better — but rather, making you duller. How about looking at a real map, or reading a real book, or buying a real newspaper in which you might actually stumble upon a whimsical or thought-provoking piece of local journalism that can’t be found on the Huffington Post?

For now, I will stand in a crowd of a few. And when I see that smug person sitting next to me and my New Yorker, who appears unable to complete a full article because his or her iPad/Kindle/fill-in-the-blank device provides too many options, I will smile to myself and do a quiet, though revolutionary act: turn the page.