High School Filmmakers Gear Up for Festival

An artistically and technologically inclined foursome at are putting the finishing touches on their individual short film projects.

Don Goble, the broadcast technology and film instructor and assistant varsity baseball coach, has given two juniors and two seniors carte blanche to leave campus and complete an online course instruction program through Independent Student Media at their own pace.

With the Second Annual Ladue Film Fest coming the night of April 8, the heat is on for the filmmakers to edit and market the 10 to 20-minute movies they wrote, casted and shot last semester.

Douglas Chapnick, a senior headed for St. Louis Community College at Meramec next year, will premiere Crossroads at the festival.

Chapnick's movie tells the story of a band of teenage rock musicians. Simmering tensions rise to a boil when one member misses several practices and can't find the balance between his friends and his love interest.

Although Chapnick has taken a broadcasting class and assisted with the monthly Ladue View news program, he was inexperienced as a fiction filmmaker before this class began in the fall. He enjoyed the creative control of producing a movie from start to finish.

"It's different from broadcasting," Chapnick said. "It felt like I had some sort of power."

After senior Corey Vent took the class last year, he and his brother Eric, a junior, enrolled in Goble's class together. Along with the fourth classmate Joe Lombard, a junior, and other friends -- collectively Partial Vision Films -- the Vents have shot movies in their free time for years.

In 2010, they won the award for best picture at The 48 Hour Film Project in Indianapolis for Killing Time, a thriller.

Lombard and the Vents also traveled to Orlando last weekend with Goble and three other Ladue High School students for the Student Television Network's annual convention. Assigned a set of parameters and the title What Goes Up Must Come Down, the group created short film under time limitations and received an honorable mention in the competition.

"It's interesting to see that we can produce a five-minute film in 16 hours," Eric Vent said. "With deadlines, you had to stick to that."

As of Monday afternoon, the only student of the four to finish his film was Lombard, whose Angels Below tells the tragic tale of a kid dealing with substance abuse. A cataclysmic event changes his life for the worse, which forces him to reconsider his drug habit.

Lombard said one of the challenges of making a short film is knowing how much detail to include in the plot.

"I've definitely learned not to try to fit a feature length movie in 10 minutes," Lombard said.

Eric Vent's Illegal Tender chronicles a bank heist, while Corey's Pulse follows two ex-convicts upon their release from prison.

All four student filmmakers directed Ladue players from an acting class that runs at the same time as Goble's class. The Vents' movies focus on older characters, which has put the acting chops of their performing arts peers to the test.

"It's important that they project an air of experience," Corey Vent said.

The broadcasting and filmmaking classes at Ladue give alums a leg-up once they enter college. Goble's former pupils have gone on to prestigious film programs at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.

"What we find when our students graduate is as freshmen, they're as prepared as juniors or seniors," Goble said. "They're able to get involved almost immediately."

Goble is in his sixth year as a teacher at Ladue.

The film festival will be held in the school auditorium. Tickets for the  7 p.m. show cost $5 and can be purchased in the cafeteria or at the box office. Attendance is open to the public.

Last year's entries and trailers for this year's movies can be viewed on the Ladue High School Films website.

A series of students' one to two-minute shorts from the school's Animation Department will be played alongside the live action films.