Teaching a new generation of filmmakers, Randall Kramen is the new audio/video production teacher at Melissa High School. He comes from a family of teachers, but that’s not what he did initially. At the start of his career, he was only working on making films, but eventually he found that teaching was his true calling, and that it was what made him happy.

Mr. Kramen started with dubbing over VHS tapes for fun in his free time while his dad worked. He shared a passion for movies with his father, who would help him get VHS tapes to dub over.

He worked in the industry for quite a while, getting to know some influential people, but once he saw just what kind of life was required of those who were high up in the industry, he realized that he just couldn’t do the same. After all, he was a newly married man, and that kind of lifestyle just couldn’t work well with that. Eventually, he came to the idea of teaching.

When he decided to enter the education field, it was partially because so many of his family members on both sides were teachers. Even his mom was a teacher, so it absolutely ran in the family. At first, he was anxious about teaching, but quickly, he fell in love with it. He loved being able to educate students about what he loved, and hopefully, they would come to love it, too!

Mr. Kramen’s favorite short film that he worked on was “Tommy Superstar”–a short film with him as the main character, Tommy Superstar, a washed up movie star trying to reclaim his glory days, which had long since passed him. He does this even at the cost of his relationship with his son, and the film is about Tommy realizing that his son is more important to him than his stardom.

Mr. Kramen decided to transition his career to Melissa after he realized that Anna was not going to continue working out, so he decided to start looking for somewhere that would be able to give students the opportunity to focus more on the narrative aspect of the class, whereas Anna wanted to focus more on the news reporting aspect.

Currently, Mr. Kramen is excited to be able to give students the opportunity that he wished he had had as a kid because the closest thing to his class that he had was journalism, which is much different than audio video production. He believes that what students need is just a small push to be able to succeed.