For most people, having only three days to create a film from scratch seems like an impossible task. But this year, seniors Heba Alwan and Olivia Santiago and junior Brody Pleasants did just that as part of the annual Adrenaline Film Project in early November.
During the Adrenaline Film Project, teams have 72 hours to make a film in a specific genre (action) while incorporating an assigned prop (a small piece of picket fence) and line of dialogue (“Add it to the pile”). But before the work begins, teams must go through an initiation meeting.
“Yeah, it was pretty stressful,” director Heba Alwan said. “We were all in the auditorium [at Lighthouse Studios], and we were asked by the mentors to pick three genres that we would be comfortable doing, and then name three examples.” After that, teams were quizzed on the genres they picked.
Teams then had to write a pitch to be approved by mentors Steve Robillard, Han West, Rachel Lane, and Jeff Wadlow. After the mentors gave the green light, scriptwriting began.
“It’s been described that [for] either the line or the prop, they give you a lot of ideas,” writer Olivia Santiago said. “I did lean a lot on what my team was saying. Heba and Brody and Mr. P [filmmaking teacher Trevor Pryzuski], they gave me a lot of ideas with how to format the script and the story.”
“We just threw things against the wall. It was like, ‘Oh, what if this guy is being chased by these two girls and is looking for his girlfriend’s cellphone,’” editor Brody Pleasants said. “It was just us seeing what worked.”
With the script finished, Alwan, Santiago, and Pleasants started the casting process. However, not everything went as planned.
“We had this database of actors that Lighthouse gave us, but most of them were either taken by other films, or the ones we did cast canceled,” Pleasants said. “Finding actors was definitely hard, and that made everything harder. We had to improvise.”
“We lost one [actor] the night before filming,” Alwan said. The actor had committed to their project, but ended up dropping out. Another actor quit the contest entirely and notified the team an hour after filming was supposed to start. “So that was really stressful.”
They ended up casting alums Josh Mohale (AHS ‘23) in the leading role of Josh and Eliza Bansaszak (AHS ‘22) as his girlfriend Maggy. The team began shooting their film soon after, in which Josh attempts to find his girlfriend Maggy’s stolen phone. However, the search turns into more than he bargains for, culminating in a chase scene and a rooftop fight.
“We didn’t follow the script much,” Santiago said. “We knew we had to meet certain points, get our character from here to there.”
The weather also made this difficult when filming the rooftop fight. “Heba and Olivia…they were freezing their butts off. It was very, very, cold. Everyone wanted to leave, but we still persisted,” Pleasants said.
During the fight scene, one of the villains gets thrown off the top of the building, a sequence that posed a challenge to film.
“There are lots of things you write when you’re in the moment and think ‘Oh, this would be so cool. We can definitely do this.’ And then you start thinking about how you’re actually going to film and you’re like, Wait, I don’t know if this is possible,” Alwan said.
To produce the effect of the villain falling off the building, the first shot shows her running out of frame, and the next shows the villain lying on the ground.
With filming done, editing could begin in full force on the final day of the Adrenaline Film Project.
“Brody’s editing skills are so good,” Alwan said. “I remember just trying to sort through all of the footage and he did it so quickly.”
“The last day, we were just editing, editing, editing,” Pleasants said. “We got to put this in, put this, and get out of there!”
“They put up on a big projector the time counting down,” Santiago said. When it came to which shots made the final cut, the team chose some of their favorites with the guidance of filmmaking teacher Trevor Pryzuski.
“One of the shots we liked is when Josh is going to the car and he’s banging on the door. He goes around, and you can see the girlfriend talking to him, and then zooms in on the [villain] girl,” Pleasants said.
“My favorite shot in ‘A Man of Action’ was when the girlfriend was in the car, and I did this zoom/racking the focus thing. That was suggested by Han [West], one of our mentors,” Alwan said.
Finally, after 72 stressful hours, the team submitted “A Man of Action.”
“It’s very fun. It’s a very challenging three days,” Pleasants said. “But it really shows how determined you are to make the film.”
“I wish I did this last year!” Santiago said.
You can watch the final cut of A Man of Action below or on YouTube.
