Friday, Sep. 26, 2008

Central senior on film crew bound for AFI Fest

By SANDRA ENGELLAND

For Selen Flores, a senior at Central High School, an interest in film has resulted in some exciting opportunities.

This summer, Flores spent a week with 14 other aspiring teen filmmakers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area creating a short film for the Samsung Fresh Films contest.

Their 10-minute drama Saturday beat out films from eight other cities to win the top prize in the contest: an all-expense paid trip to the American Film Institute’s film festival in November and a Hollywood premiere party.

The journey to Hollywood started last spring when Flores applied for the contest by writing an essay about why she wanted to be a filmmaker and stating an idea for a short film. She was one of 100 teens chosen from about 2,000 applicants to participate.

"I found out two days before school ended last spring that I made it," said Flores, a member of Central’s film club. "I had applied to Fresh Films two years ago and hadn’t made it."

In June, Flores spent a hectic seven days with the Dallas crew covering all aspects of filmmaking. Their script, written by a teen, had been chosen by contest organizers.

The group started the week with a casting call, screening more than 100 actors for the parts of a teen girl struggling with a difficult home life, her mother, sister and boyfriend. The second day they had callbacks, and they picked the final cast by day three.

Meanwhile, the crew was getting a crash course in using the cameras, microphones, video editing software and other equipment.

Besides the mechanics of filming, the crew was learning how to set up locations, get props and food for the cast and crew, create storyboards to plan filming and more.

On Thursday, the crew hit the streets in Dallas and suburbs to the east to shoot the film. They worked from 8 a.m. to well past midnight. The last two days were spent editing the footage and creating their plan to market the film.

In those seven days, Flores learned the basics about the film industry. "I learned I didn’t want to be a director. I want to be a producer; my strong suit is producing."

Flores found she enjoyed pre-production planning, coordinating shoots and marketing the film. Back in northeast Tarrant County, Flores went to work encouraging everyone she met to vote for the Dallas film online. The crew for the film that received the most votes at www.fresh-films.com would win the trip to Hollywood.

Flores created cards and handed them out at Southlake Town Square. She talked to people where she works, at Chik-Fil-A in Watauga to get interest in the film. She put out notices on MySpace, Facebook and other Internet sites. When school started, she had a spot on daily announcements asking students to vote for her film.

"It was a lot of work, and it really paid off," she said.

Alana Bardauskis, publicity and marketing manager for Dreaming Tree Films, a Chicago company that created the Fresh Films concept five years ago, said that the voting for this year’s films was the contest’s busiest and closest ever. The site received over 2 million votes with Dallas winning by a fraction of a percent over the Chicago crew.

Bardauskis said the volume of voting showed that Fresh Films has reached a lot of people. The idea is to generate interest among youth for creating films. "We’re giving teens hands-on experience, as close to a 360-degree experience in film as they can get in seven days."

Like Flores, teens can uncover skills they didn’t know they had and generate interest that could spur them on to a career. "They learn to be proactive and creative teenagers and how to be problem-solvers," Bardauskis said. "What we see at the end of the day is maybe they’re not another Spielberg or Coppola, but they can be a little more confident in what they bring to the table."

Flores is looking forward to the Hollywood premiere and is considering options for studying filmmaking at college.