Kansas film alum and his professor team up again, this time for a Daytime Emmy Award

University of Kansas professor Matt Jacobson met a young Jeremy Osbern at a student film festival and says they “bonded immediately.”

Osbern became a student in Jacobson’s film and media studies classes and went on to become a prolific filmmaker based in Lawrence, sometimes sharing the cinematographer role with his mentor.

For their latest project, they have been nominated for a national Daytime Emmy Award for cinematography on the locally made web series “The Square Root.”

“It’s nice when former students remember their old professors,” Jacobson said.

Osbern co-directed and co-wrote “The Square Root” with his wife, Misti Boland. It’s a four-episode relationship drama about memory and choices. Each surreal episode is just a few minutes long and focuses on one character and the seconds before he or she makes a life-altering decision.

“It’s a very dynamic, very fast-paced drama,” Jacobson said. “It’s almost like a music video without music in the way that you’re introduced to these characters.”

Jacobson and Osbern have worked on several projects together, including Academy Award winner Kevin Willmott’s “The Only Good Indian,” about a Kickapoo boy forced to attend a distant boarding school, and “Jayhawkers,” about Wilt Chamberlain’s playing days at KU.

For “The Square Root,” Osbern shot his portion digitally, and Jacobson used film.

“The images that you see are the things that are racing through a character’s head right before they make a big decision, so we really wanted to represent memory in different ways, and part of that was filming on different formats,” Osbern said.

Jacobson’s film elements act as flashbacks, which he said brought a different feel.

“It’s sort of representing how when people look back on their own memories,” Osbern said. “Some of them are crystal clear and some of them are a little more hazy.”

The series filmed at locations in Lawrence, such as Clinton Lake and the University of Kansas campus, and at Osbern’s aunt and uncle’s house in Johnson County. Osbern and Boland even used their own house as one of the locations.

“We just had to wake up in the morning and we were there,” Osbern said.

The series also used an entirely local crew. Lawrence-based musician Matt Pryor of The Get Up Kids wrote and recorded an original song for the end credits.

Although this is Jacobson’s first national nomination, it isn’t Osbern and Boland’s. Their 2016 short form web series, “Red Bird,” a Western about a gun-slinging mom out for revenge, was nominated for four Daytime Emmys.

They’ve worked on short films and feature films, but “Red Bird” was their first project told in episodes. They returned to the form with “The Square Root.”

“We wanted a self-contained project that we could afford and manage with limited time, so short form was really the way to go,” Osbern said.

Along with the Daytime Emmy Award nomination, “The Square Root” is also picking up awards and nominations on the film festival circuit, including in Italy, Germany and Santa Monica, California.

Producers mostly funded the project, but Boland and Osbern raised $5,000 in a Kickstarter campaign in December to have the series viewed more widely — and to help with the Emmy submission.

They have some stiff competition against cinematographers from networks like Amazon Prime Video and NBC.

“We’ve got this filmmaker and this film professor in the Midwest who are nominated against the cinematographer who filmed ‘Lost in Translation,’ ‘Adaptation’ and ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ so we’re in good company for this,” Jacobson said.

“Just being nominated is a wonderful thing,” Jacobson said. “Of course winning would be better.”

The Daytime Emmy Awards air at 7 p.m. June 26 on CBS. The ceremony will be presented remotely due to COVID-19.

“The Square Root” is currently not available for public viewing, but Osbern said they are working to partner with platforms interested in showing the series.

This story was originally published June 22, 2020 at 12:53 PM with the headline "Kansas film alum and his professor team up again, this time for a Daytime Emmy Award."