Plans are in the works to build a film school and high-tech studio in Raton, New Mexico.

The new Kearny Film Studio and Education Center is slated to open next year in a historic brick school building. It’ll house workshops and classrooms for wardrobe design, makeup, carpentry and other film industry jobs, along with production offices and editing suites.

Ann Theis of El Raton Media Works, the non-profit behind the project, said their future students will get training in the entire filmmaking process and learn skills applicable to life and careers.

“Whether they end up choosing to become filmmakers or not,” she said, ‘they (will) have practiced how to communicate, how to tell their story, how to organize things, and how to accomplish something.”

The non-profit group is also aiming to make the facility home to the region’s first extended reality or XR stage. It's cutting-edge technology in the movie and gaming industry that uses huge LED walls to create virtual reality settings and scenes.

The imagery on the LED walls on an XR stage adjusts in conjunction with how the characters are moving, Theis said, so “when the cameras are shooting, the background moves accordingly. So it looks like real life — the way the background changes as people are moving through space.”

Theis said the XR studio they’re hoping to build would be 50 feet wide and 25 feet high, totaling some 7,400 square feet, with motion tracking sensors throughout. It would be constructed in a new building on the existing Kearney school campus.

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