Explosions filled the Castaic skyline Thursday evening at Jimmy Lifton’s, LIMS, or Lifton Institute of Media arts and Sciences.

A layer of thick smoke sought to smother the darkness, peppered with bright flashes from the simulated gunfire.

Or, as the founder of Lifton Institute for Media Arts & Sciences calls it, “another one of our typical LIMS shoots.”

During Thursday’s shoot last week, Lifton also used his facility to reach a new educational demographic, a group of SCVi students.

Representatives from the public charter school also in Castaic connected with the founder of LIMS, which is just a few miles away, during the 2017 KHTS Sacramento Road Trip.

“We sort of invited each other (to our respective campuses),” said Amer Kuric, director of operations for iLEAD, “and we thought there might have been some synergy between what they’re doing, and our focus on media arts.”

Jimmy Lifton, of LIMS film school, created the facility in Castaic with a plan to train veterans to work in every aspect of a production crew.

“We’ve been stepping up production all the way around,” Lifton said, discussing how the increase in filming at his studio also means more opportunities for his students — veterans seeking job retraining through a rigorous 10-week course. “Our crews are being trained and more people are hearing about us.”

His years of experience in a Hollywood production house have helped transform LIMS into not only a fertile training ground for industry hopefuls with an 80 percent job placement rate overall, but also a full-service studio that hosted a TV show production by Vivica A. Fox last week.

Di-Anne Walker, a veteran who trained at LIMS and then began working for Fox, garnered the shoot for LIMS, another opportunity for the military veterans learning every aspect of production to show off their skills.

“Every line item that has a production budget, makeup, visual sets, set construction, we teach,” Lifton said, noting the South Bay Workforce Investment Board just recognized his program’s employee[placement rate. “It’s all about jobs.”

The experience was an eye-opener for SCVi students, Kuric said, noting they all appeared energized by all of the activity surrounding the set. Lifton, for his part, said he was looking forward to visiting the SCVi campus next week.

“They were very impressed by seeing how big of a team is required, and how closely they need to work in order to make that happen,” Kuric said. “It was very dramatic and that definitely raised the level of interest in the kids.”