Voices of a generation, young film-makers have presented short video stories of themselves and others. From left, Hannah Tallant, Mia Lazar, and Emerson Dove in Blacksburg High School’s Cinema and Photography Production class. Their films will be shown with other official selections in the VHSL film festival, June 2 in Charlottesville.
Voices of our time, in two experimental films and a documentary, four high-school filmmakers have roamed the New River Valley filming creeks, snow, each other, tracking down and interviewing historically significant people and editing furiously to produce short films about the world as they see it and maybe how we should too.
Charles Keller, Radford High School junior, whose film ‘Burnt’ among the officially selected in the VHSL film competition to be show at the Charlottesville festival, June 2.
This spring, the Virginia High School League film festival received 96 film submissions in Narrative, Experimental, Commercial, Animated, and Documentary categories. In April, a panel of Virginia filmmakers and critics pared that number down to 32, making an Official Selection. Three of those thirty-two were from Montgomery County students. From Blacksburg High School, Mia Lazar produced a documentary; and Hannah Tallant and Emerson Dove, and Radford High School’s Charles Keller made experimental films.
On June 2, the 32 films selected will be honored with a screening at the festival, which will be held at Piedmont Virginia Community College’s V. Earl Dickinson Building on June 2.
The panel was made up of people who are working in or teaching film, University faculty, a Smithsonian and National Geographic documentary film editor, Many of whom got their start as interns, like Wes Harris, now a programmer with the Virginia Film Festival.
“One of the most exciting parts of my job as a film curator is having the privilege to discover and engage with artists at all stages of their careers,” panelist Harris wrote in an email. “While it’s certainly always a thrill to meet and work with iconic filmmakers and actors, it’s equally exciting to see the next new wave of young student artists coming into their own, finding their creative style and voice, and sharing their film art with an audience.”
For both the audience and the artist, film, they say, lets us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time, and both Experimental films depict, with metaphor, color and camera angle, struggles with depression and growing up.
At Radford High School, junior Charles Keller, 17, used a DSLR, friends, Adobe Premier, significant technical nous and his mother’s kitchen sink to produce a 5-minute video called ‘Burnt’
“Mainly it was all done by me. My friends helped me to film one part – a really time-sensitive scene because we were working with water and candles at the same time,” he said.
Filmed mostly at his house, at a creek in Wildwood and on the New River, 15 music tracks and his friends Draven Mullin and Tyler Gravely filmed quickly.
With his film instructor Case Worley, he started planning it in around March.
“It took me about two weeks I worked on it a lot for a week,” Keller said queueing up the film with quick, deft whacks of the keyboard. He’s gotten a lot of support from family.
“My parents were all about it. My mom’s in interior design at Radford. They’re all about the creativity. Really on board for it ,” he said. His dad helped him build part of the set. A lot of support, but the tagline of the film is ‘Inside the mind of burning depression’
“So a lot of it was in my way trying to cope with the anxiety. Trying to show what I feel today. It was really trying to like, represent that visually and create stimulating work to show what that feels like in your mind,” Keller said.
The work, and actually doing the work, is cathartic and palliative
“Just being able express it, to show how it feels helps, in a way, vent about it. I found that doing this work helps calm me down and helps me express it and understand what I’m feeling. Writing stuff down on paper is just getting it out of my head.”
No stranger to film making, Keller has helped make movies for the Radford University film festival and he is influenced by director Wes Anderson’s cinematographer Robert Yoeman’s fastidious attention to detail, humor, color palette, and iconoclasm.
“and it’s meaningful …I really admire his use of color and I feel like how his movies put such a big role onto the color like framing a composition. Like how he [Robert Yeoman] always centers things instead of using the Rule of Thirds. I’m all for the Rule of Thirds, but at the same time just that use of making something feel so powerful by centering it.”
Asked, “Are you happy?” Keller considers.
“After this, I mean, I definitely feel a lot better. Also seeing the video, I’m happy and proud of myself for making something that I’m happy with.”
Meanwhile, among the banks of computer monitors, reflective photography umbrellas, the blinking 15 terrabyte server and the greenscreen room at Blacksburg High School, sophomores Hannah Tallant in a peach pink lace romper and gold high tops and Emerson Dove in a black t-shirt talk about their film “Anxious” which presents Tallant’s own struggles with depression.
Tallant and Dove met last year in photography class. When they heard about the competition they chose each other.
“We’re really close friends and we’re stronger together than separately,” Tallant said.
She wrote the poem the movie illustrates filming at Pandpas Pond, people’s houses and Smith Mountain Lake orchestrating travel logistics through the winter, editing with Final Cut Pro and putting the whole powerful piece together over weeks.
“I brought more the technical side,” Dove said. “Also, I provided rides.”
“The films are allowed a minimum of 3 minutes and a max of 8 minutes. Ours is 4 minutes and 50 seconds,” Tallant said. “It took a long time. We started planning in November and finalized, finally, in April.”
There is a snowfall scene and the gelid winter light carries the serious theme. Capturing this troubling look at young life, applying to the competition itself was overwhelming too they said.
“We didn’t know if we’d get in and we didn’t know if it was good or not,” Hannah said. “Compared to previous years, we thought, yeah it was pretty good, but everybody steps up their competition to beat things that came before.”
When asked, “Do you love it?” Hannah says, “Yes. I do.” She intends a future in film.
“So, I want to go to NYU for Film & Photography and Psychology.”
For Dove, with hands-on technical knowledge, his interests and choices are more varied.
“I don’t know. I’m interested in music production as well,” he said.
The VHSL film festival is four years old, in each of those Blacksburg High School has competed.
Mia Lazar, 16 years old and a sophomore at Blacksburg High School came to film making through her love of research, story telling and reading obituaries.
“I like to read obituaries and one of the attorneys who argued successfully for full coeducation at the University of Virginia, John Lowe, had just died,” Lazar said.
Her documentary “When Compromise is Unacceptable: Coeducation at University of Virginia” recounts with film clips, Skyped and in-person interviews, and still footage tells the story of the significant struggle women faced to batter down that civil rights barrier in 1969 one of the last male-only public universities in the nation.
“When a woman tried to participate in class and wanted to talk, the men would stomp their feet loudly, so she couldn’t be heard,” Lazar said.
Lazar interviewed a friend’s grandmother, a Charlottesville residents who, in the early 60s recounted what it was like to be “a second class person, because I was a girl.”
Lazar researched and recounted the history of gender discrimination at the public university and interviewed lawyers involved in the very hearings that led to the first woman, Virginia Scott, being admitted to UVA finally in 1969.
“Not enough people know how recent it was,” Lazar said.
Interested in math, science too, Lazar sees filmmaking as a tool to research and investigating.
“Don’t be afraid to ask questions and talk to a lot of people,” she said. “You have to go on a treasure hunt, especially if it’s a story that isn’t told enough, if it wasn’t publicized. If you dig deep, you can find really good stories. My favorite part is sifting through documents and the finding people in those stories.”
The VHSL Film Festival will be held on June 2 at Piedmont Community College Dickenson Theater in Charlottesville, VA.
They’ll show all the films all day,” Sharon Condoulis of VHSL said. “and the directors will come up on stage and take questions from the audience and then have awards. We’ll have an Audience Choice awards too. It’s really fun. Only five schools are going to win, so adding that Audience Choice is a little something that the kids really like,” she said.
In the end, all four local filmmakers, made very different movies, but had very similar advice to new filmmakers. In the end, all four advise others: “don’t be afraid” and “find the thing you love and do it.”
