Lights, camera, action!

For their end of year project, film studies students are taking on the roles of directors, producers, actors and screenwriters as they go from watching the movies to making them.

“The students are putting about two months of class time and several weekends of work into their films,” film said studies teacher Jody McCabe. “It is probably about twenty hours of work total.”

Each of McCabe’s classes, as well as film studies teacher Lindsay Burgess’s classes  are creating a film for a festival, which will be held June 4 from 6 to 9 p.m. All seven films will be shown, and there will be an Oscars-style award show, renamed the Oscar Meier’s, where awards will be given out in categories such as best director, best cinematography and best picture. There will be different categories for the IB students and the regular students.

McCabe said she thinks the project is a positive experience for the students because it shows them all of the work that must have gone into the movies they watched all year.

“An appreciation for the art of filmmaking only comes from actually making a film,” McCabe said. “You can’t really understand how hard it is and the work that goes into it just from watching it.”

For the festival, there will be several genres of films. The two classes of IB film studies students are required to make horror films as part of what McCabe calls the Scare Your Pants Off contest, which will be shown at the festival.

Juniors Mitch Hartigan and Bernice Go are both directors of horror films for the contest and said, so far, directing has taken a lot of hard work but has been a great experience.

“When it comes to directing, you have to make a storyboard and you have to stay within the screenwriters’ directions,” Go said. “As a director, you have to make all of the executive decisions on the camera directions and the actors’ actions.”

Hartigan, Go and McCabe said they all have high expectations for the finished films and look forward to the screenings.

“I’m hoping everyone gets scared at the end,” Hartigan said of his film.                                                                                               

McCabe said she is excited not only for the audience reactions, but for her students’.

McCabe said, “I’m just excited about seeing the students’ reactions to their films on the big screen.”