The second Ithaca College students arrived at their hotel on the Caribbean island of Antigua Janice Levy, associate professor of cinema and photography, spotted a wedding and told her students to grab their cameras.

“I immediately jumped out of the car and said ‘Okay guys, time to take pictures,’” Levy said. “I believe you should never miss an opportunity to photograph something, especially when you get to a new culture.”

The students groaned and grumbled about being tired since they just endured an eight-hour flight with a lay over in North Carolina. But Levy, followed by continuing education student John Barduhn, shot for an hour. This was just the beginning of a whirlwind two weeks.

Seven Ithaca College students traveled to Antigua for the two- week workshop in either photography, led by Levy, or cinematic writing, led by Elisabeth Nonas, assistant professor in the cinema and photography department. Fifteen Antiguan students joined the group once they reached the island.

Levy made initial connections in Antigua in 2002 with Howard and Mitzi Allen, a husband and wife team that owns their own independent film and television production company. The program is the first of many steps recently taken by Ithaca College to establish a connection in the Caribbean.

The trip left the students with new cultural and sometimes emotionally moving experiences. For Barduhn’s final project, he was assigned to photograph the Amazing Grace Foundation, a home for severely disabled children.

“That was one of the most emotional times in my life,” Barduhn said.

Taking the photos wasn’t the problem, it was thinking about the situation and realizing the conditions of the foundation, which relies on donations to keep running. Barduhn remembers walking into the house carrying thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment and wondering how much food that would buy.

Senior Heather Matthews was sent to the Sunshine Home for Girls as her major photo project. There she encountered troubled girls as young as eight, who were too young to enter the prison systems.

At the beginning of the workshop the Antiguan students and the Ithaca students were put in pairs, which really helped Matthews.

“It’s a great way to learn the area,” she said, “I became really close to my buddy.”

Not all the projects were so emotionally challenging, though.

Junior Kate Tomlinson was assigned to photograph an animal shelter. She even got to play with the animals. But her favorite photo is one she snapped at one of Antigua’s 365 beaches. Tomlinson was setting up to take a picture of a vendor selling colorful sarongs hanging from a string.

“Just as I was taking the picture this little girl stepped through [the sarongs]. It’s a really great picture,” Tomlinson said.

At first they were apprehensive about the photo students, but once the students spent time around the market instead of just running around like tourists, the vendors were more than happy to be photographed. The Antiguan students also helped their Ithaca counterparts fit in by guiding them around, both to do assignments and to have fun.

The pace of life struck the Ithaca students as drastically different. Because their schedules were so busy, the students would often simply grab a sandwich from a street vendor for lunch because the atmosphere in Antigua is so relaxed that it would take an hour to get your food at a restaurant. The vendors were only one option for fast food, of course, as was KFC, the only American restaurant the students saw.

With beaches, street vendors and friendly people galore, there were plenty of photo opportunities to keep the students working for 12 to 15 hours a day. When they were done shooting, they would return to the digital printing lab set up in a conference room in their hotel. Senior Denise Cermanski got the opportunity to follow around a former Antiguan senator, Bill Abbott, who also was once titled the strongest man in the West Indies.

“We would stay there all through the night and edit our photos,” Cermanski said. “We had a blast. We called it the ‘war room.’”

While the photo students were assigned places to go and people to follow or tackling the “war room” to produce their prints, the screenwriting students already knew what they wanted to do.

Sophomore Mike Potter went to Antigua to attend the “Thinking Cinematically” writing workshop and to scout potential locations for fellow Park scholars to do volunteer work.

He, too, encountered moving moments. On a trip to find a volunteer location, Potter met an elderly man who runs the local Red Cross. The man told Potter about a time when he received hundreds of thank-you letters for his help after a hurricane a few years ago.

Potter worked on a screenplay during the workshop. The writing course in Antigua offered guidance with either prose or screenplays.

All the Antiguan students had already decided to write scripts. The Ithaca College students also settled on scripts once they arrived.

Only one Antiguan writing student was actually college age, while the rest were adults already well into their careers, which ranged from construction worker to published author.

Nonas said that teaching the Antiguan students was different than teaching students at Ithaca. Classes at Ithaca College are designed to guide students into a topic for their projects.

“[The Antiguan students] already knew what they wanted to write,” Nonas said. “They had a lot of ideas, they had a lot of thoughts, they had a lot of experiences.”

With the students already having script ideas, the focus of the course shifted to help them develop, instead of create, topics.

While none of the Ithaca students would trade their Antigua experience, Barduhn especially would love to go back.

“I told Professor Levy, ‘If you ever do this again, I don’t care where I am, call me,’” he said. “I’ll take her class part-time so I can go again.”