Have you ever watched a short film about a girl going through her voicemails as she begins to move on with her life?
In Norwalk High School, there is an after-school activity, called Speech, where students can improve on their public speaking, and speech in general. There are different categories that students can choose to enter in competition, such as musical theater, acting, and short films.
“We have records going back to the ‘80s”, said Tim Clay, a high school social studies teacher, who also works as a Large Group and Individual Speech coach. “We also have a document of All-State records that go back decades.”
Clay said that filmmaking seems to be a pretty popular category.
“It seems like the students do enjoy filmmaking,” he said. “We have three short films every year that I’ve been here. We’ve gotten some spooky short films over the years, like a demon possession, friends extracting revenge on each other, and we’ve had haunted schools this year. We also have another group that’s doing Dungeons and Dragons, and another doing an emotional breakup. So it’s been quite fun.”
Some students have already created their films.
“It started off as an idea,” said Callie Watrous, a senior who has been in Speech since freshman year. “I wanted to do a film with voicemails over a background of a girl moving on. We kind of just brainstormed different scenes we could do, what was going to be said in the voicemails, and then we did a lot of filming.”
Students can do different things behind the scenes when it comes to filmmaking.
“I do the editing,” Watrous said. “So I’d get all the stuff on the camera and take bits and pieces, see which videos I think would work best, and then I’d organize them in order from beginning to end, and just put the pieces together to make the film that we have now.”
It can take a long time to come up with an idea for the film, according to Natalie Olsen, who has also been in Speech since freshman year.
“We did a lot of planning on filming,” she said. “We always had to come up with the ideas about how what we are going to film is going to be able to flow into the next scene.”
Olsen thinks it was great to have the chance to do filmmaking.
“I’ve been in Blackshirts since my freshman year,” Olsen said, “I’ve always been kind of interested in filming and photography, so having this opportunity to do this, it was really fun and I think the whole process was just really enjoyable, and it was fun to collaborate with others.”
As the students finish their short films, they have started to upload their videos onto Youtube. If anyone is interested in watching a video to see what’s up, check out the link to the one made with the help of Watrous and Olsen.
