It really didn’t look like a classroom.

Truth be told, it looked a lot like a bar.

That’s because it was Benjamin’s Tavern on Franklin Street in Bangor. While patrons started to trickle in, students and graduates of the New England School of Communications were busy gaining experience by shooting a video of the rock band Spilled Milk, which was playing there on this recent Tuesday night. Benjamin’s is a place that the local band plays regularly, which is why the tavern was a natural choice for the filming.

The members of Spilled Milk, guitarist-lead singer Doug Hoyt, bassist Nate Hall, drummer Mike Arnold and keyboard player Michael Rancourt, played “Too Late,” set to be the first single off their upcoming album tentatively titled “Soul Salvation.”

Director Kit McCall of Picasquared Productions or his helper filmed the band with a camera that glided along a track laid down on the bar’s floor. Flitting in and out were two student videographers, shooting documentary footage about the process of making the album.

Taking all this in was Gary Moretti. An anesthetist with Nurse Anesthesia of Maine by day, Moretti is the executive producer on the Spilled Milk project and the owner of Rotten Rosie Records.

“There’s nothing more cleansing than being around these artists,” Moretti said.

The driving forces of this project are Hoyt and Moretti, who both are teachers at NESCOM, the former teaching audio engineering and the history of rock ‘n’ roll and the latter the business of the music industry. Founded in 1981 as the New England School of Broadcasting, NESCOM is located on the Husson College campus in Bangor. The school, which has 300 students, offers programs in radio, television, audio engineering, advertising-public relations, digital media, news and sports broadcasting and general communications.

Hoyt, formerly part of the popular band Sister Blue, was a founding member of Spilled Milk, which has been around since 1995. Its current lineup has been together for three years, and when the time came to record its fourth album, Hoyt knew that NESCOM offered the resources that his band needed, and that they could in turn help students.

“It was such a no-brainer,” Hoyt said. “We have a state-of-the-art recording studio, and people don’t know it exists. We also get to pick the best students who go here. Not only does it help us, to work with quality equipment and students, but also we’re giving them that forum to work with a quality band and experience what it’s going to be like in the real world.”

Hoyt again tabbed senior Stephanie Dufresne, who also worked with the group on its last album, as producer. The album is expected to be released in late spring or early summer, although the band hasn’t settled on a label to produce and distribute it yet.

Spilled Milk has continued to evolve musically in the studio, Hoyt added.

“I’m the exclusive lyricist, but it’s more of a collaborative effort musically [this album],” he said. “We’ve benefited a lot from that, because rather than it being one person’s vision, it’s more of a band effort.”

Spilled Milk wants to move up to bigger markets, and it takes more than a CD to do that these days.

“If you’re going to take that next step, you need that video aspect,” Hoyt said. “To be able to present this to a variety of people in the industry, it’s going to make us more viable.”

When it came time to make the video, Hoyt contacted McCall, a recent NESCOM graduate. Together, they created the story line for the video.

“It was my first project in this form,” McCall explained. “So I wanted him to tell me what he pictured in his mind when he wrote this. I took his vision and looked to bring it to life.”

The shoot at Benjamin’s took place over two nights. On the first night, a Monday, the bar was closed, but owners Dan O’Connell and Dave Violette opened it for the video filming. McCall used invited people to fill the tables and chairs and took some master shots for the opening of the video. He also shot scenes featuring actors Amanda Shields and Erik Catelle.

“That took a lot of the tension out, because we had gotten a lot of the hard stuff out of the way,” McCall said. “Tuesday night was more fun.”

On this night, McCall’s crew buzzed in for hand-held close-ups of band members and took some candid shots at the bar during a set break. Later on, McCall laid down the track behind one section of the bar, running a camera back and fourth for footage from that angle.

While all this was going on, Moretti was working the room, or just plain working, hauling gear for McCall. He joked that the executive producer is “a roadie who handles the budget.”

While anesthesia is Moretti’s business, music is his love. While the guitarist said that he was never a serious musician, he did fondly remember his high-school band once opening for Wilson Pickett and Every Mother’s Son.

Moretti grew up around music. His parents’ Italian restaurant in St. Louis was attached to a dance hall, which was located alongside the National Trail, a precursor to the interstate highway system. This meant that all the major acts of the day passed by, and sometimes played the dance hall, and the young Moretti had a front-row seat. He later went to college in music-rich New Orleans and worked in Utah at the time when the Austin outlaw scene was coming into prominence. After moving in Maine in 1980, he learned studio engineering from John Dyer at Unintentional Studios in Blue Hill.

Coming from such a background, Moretti has been disappointed to see a decline in the live-music scene in the Bangor area over the past 25 years. That’s why he hopes that NESCOM and area musicians can come together in a way that’s beneficial to both.

“It’s important to produce quality demos and materials for labels to look at,” Moretti said. “NESCOM gives [musicians] an opportunity to have a community of people around them with some level of expertise who can create an opportunity for artists to make a living with their art.”

That’s why Hoyt is working with NESCOM on the Spilled Milk album.

“It helps that I’m able to help former and current students hone their skills in the industry they want to work in,” he said. “It doesn’t get any more real than this.”

By early March, McCall plans to shoot more scenes for the “Too Late” video in downtown Bangor and a residence. He wants to have the roughly 41/2-minute video ready by April 1.

Hoyt said the video and other footage would be used for promotion and perhaps a DVD to be included with “Soul Salvation.”

The video is likely to have its debut April 22, as part of Sessions at One College Circle, a twice-a-semester event at Husson. Spilled Milk will play live in a studio, and the performance will be simulcast on the closed-circuit channel on campus and student radio station WHSN (89.3 FM). The video would air while the band is re-tuning its instruments, Hoyt said.

Moretti hopes that the Spilled Milk album is the first of many such joint projects.

“This would allow students, faculty and people in the community to collaborate on work, so that no one goes broke doing it,” he said.

Spilled Milk will be playing at 9 p.m. Saturday at the Chocolate Grill in Old Town. The band also will be playing one Tuesday a month at Benjamin’s in Bangor, next at 9 p.m. on March 1. Dale McGarrigle can be reached at 990-8028 and dmcgarrigle@bangordailynews.net.