Film Festival May Be In Bethel Later This Month, But One

NHS Senior Has Made Sure Newtown Is Represented

By Shannon Hicks

Moviegoers at Bethel Cinema have already seen some of the film skills of Newtown resident Greg Gordon. A member of the senior class at Newtown High School, Greg created the 30-second trailer for Bethel Film Festival that has been airing before many of the current features at the four-screen cinema for the past few weeks.

The film festival itself, a first for the independently-owned and operated cinema, will run October 25–30 and will include more than 40 independent movies by filmmakers from around the globe. The festival will offer cinemaphiles full-length features, documentaries, animated films, world cinema, and student films. Greg will have one of his films screened during the block of student films scheduled to run on Saturday, October 29, between 11 am and 12:30 pm.

Greg’s trailer highlights some of the movies “and a little bit of what you’ll see at the festival,” he said last week. Greg was invited to create the trailer by Tom Carruthers, one of BFF’s co-producers and community relations director.

To create the trailer, Greg used Final Cut Pro, a Mac program that offers a professional editing nonlinear system, and is gaining popularity because “it’s an fairly easy-to-use, solid program,” Greg said.

As a volunteer for BFF, Greg was identified as someone who could work on different aspects of the festival. The BFF co-producer quickly picked up on Greg’s talent.

“We knew he had the chops to put together something for us,” Mr Carruthers said. “He’s got incredible timing for cuts and editing. He’s gonna go far.”

It took only 10 to 12 hours for Greg to put together the BFF trailer.

“Drawing together a montage is not that simple if someone doesn’t have the right timing, and he did a great job of grabbing all the right cuts, editing them together, and coming up with a great trailer,” said Mr Carruthers. “The idea that someone from the community being this involved is also great.”

Greg also submitted a nine-minute film, The Mirror Man, which has been accepted into the festival. It will be one of six films included the student films block on October 29. The seventh student film, a 103-minute feature called Harder They Fall, will be presented at 1 pm on Saturday.

The Mirror Man is about a man named Cameron who is haunted by his reflection in mirrors.

“He sees himself, but there’s something else there that bothers him,” explained Greg, who wrote, acted as cinematographer, editor, and score composer for this film. The film stars Nathaniel Basch-Gould as Cameron and Paul Ashey as Marcus, who is Cameron’s best friend.

“Cameron tries to evade that ‘mirror man,’ and even moves out of his house to escape him,” said Greg. The idea, he said, was inspired originally by an episode from the first season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents… called “The Case of Mr Pelham,” in which a man discovers that his doppelganger was taking over and then living his life.

“His movie is very good,” said Mr Carruthers. “He’s a very talented kid. He’s got a lot of good ideas, and you forget when you’re talking with him that he’s still in high school.”

Carol Spiegel also liked Greg’s movie.

“What impressed me is he understood what needs to be in a short,” said Ms Spiegel, the festival’s spokesperson and one of its co-producers. “A short is a short movie, but it still needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but with much less screen time.

“Greg’s short has a good script, good editing and cinematography, and even a good score,” she continued. “It kept my interest from beginning to end. I couldn’t stop watching — I needed to find out what happened.”

Greg’s introduction to the world of filmmaking came during the summer of 2001, when an aunt challenged him to make a short film as a summer project. For the aunt, an artist named Maureen Tott (“who can do just about anything creative,” says Greg), Greg came up with Stuck, a 15-minute story about a guy (who happened to be named Greg) who wants to go out with some of his friends but is stuck at home taking care of his kid brother. Greg wrote, directed, and even starred in the short film.

“That film was my first experience, and it shows now,” said Greg, who has already remade that first film. “When I look at that first version and then look at current work, I can see a huge difference. I’ve already come leaps and bounds.”

At Newtown High School, Greg has taken any video production class that he can get into. Two years ago he spent his summer at North Carolina School of the Arts (NCSA), an intensive summer session for filmmaking students from across the country where he studied theory and performance among other subjects. It was an important experience for him.

“That gave me a chance to collaborate with the next generation of filmmakers,” Greg recalled. “It was a great chance to meet everyone, from directors to grips and everyone in between. It was important because I got to feel what it would be like to work on a full-fledged movie set. It was a really good experience.”

Since that summer Greg has done freelance work creating demo tapes for students planning to major in opera and musical theater at college.

He also, last year, collaborated with fellow NHS student Ashley LaRocque on a promotional video created for Newtown Parks and Recreation Commission. That project, which took about a year to complete, offered numerous scenes of Parks and Recreation activities mixed with footage of interviews the students conducted with Parks & Rec Director Barbara Kasbarian, several coaches, and also several program participants. The video was created to serve as a promotional tool for the department.

Larry Haskell, the Parks and Recreation Commission chairman, worked with Greg and Ashley on that project. He came up with the idea of having a video that would promote the programs Parks & Rec provides for Newtown’s residents and while he “dabbles with home editing,” Mr Haskel knew that he needed help to bring this project to fruition.

“I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but didn’t have the time to do this properly, so I asked the schools for suggestions and they came up with [Greg and Ashley] for me,” Mr Haskel said this week. The trio met several times, with Mr Haskel outlining what he was hoping to see, and the two film students were off.

“It was great,” Mr Haskel said. “It’s a wonderful video. I thought they did a wonderful job, just a spectacular job.”

Greg is currently finishing a project for a local couple who traveled to India, Australia, and New Zealand, and wanted their experiences put together in video form. He also assists the Waterbury-based wedding photographer Eric Fiske.

On top of all this, Greg is also the director for the NHS Drama Department fall production, A Thurber Carnival. He sought that position because his hope is to be a director in the future.

“This is a good experience for me, I can already tell,” he said.

The high school senior has also done some stage acting. Among other productions, he played the male romantic lead Steve Baker in last spring’s production of Show Boat, and was an unnamed cast member in January 2004’s Drama Club production of Noises Off!

Like many of Newtown’s students involved in the NHS Drama Department, Greg even participated in Summer Theatre Connection, the younger generation’s version of summer stock. In the summer of 2002 he played a citizen of Oz, the Royal Gatekeeper, in The Wiz and the summer before that he was the crocodile in Peter Pan.

Because he’s a high school senior, Greg’s time recently has also been occupied with college applications. He has applied to schools like NCSA, New York University, University of Southern California and Boston University — all schools with strong film programs.

It has a very busy schedule that Greg keeps for himself, and with rehearsals for A Thurber Carnival already well underway — and opening night just a few weeks away — Greg is hoping to make it to at least a few Bethel Film Festival screenings.

“The [Thurber Carnival] production is a huge undertaking,” he mentioned. “I’m hoping to at least attend some of the films. Making that trailer for the festival gave me an intro to many of the films and now I want to see them.

“I’m really hoping to attend the student screening block.”

 

The Film Festival

The Bethel Film Festival will open on Tuesday, October 25, and offer area filmmakers and film lovers alike six days filled with new and recent works from known and first-time directors. Categories will include documentaries, features, short films, animation, world cinema, and student films.

All films will be screened at Bethel Cinema, 269 Greenwood Avenue.

Carol Spiegel of Newtown has been serving as festival spokesperson and a co-producer; the festival’s other co-producers have been Tom Carruthers, who is also the community relations director, and Peter Howland, who is also the festival’s director of communications and corporate sponsorship.

The first announcement of the festival and the opening of entries was on March 1. By the time the entry deadline closed on July 31, more than 250 films had been received.

A panel of five screeners  then screened  every submission that was received and decided whether to accept it into the festival.

Tickets for all films are $8 for adults, and $6 for seniors and students.

A full schedule for the October 25–30 event has now been created for the 40-plus films accepted into the festival. There will be workshops, panel discussions, a gala, and an awards brunch  among the special events.

For a full schedule, details on the films, ticket prices for the special events and more, visit BethelFilmFestival.com.