Time Alarm clock went off: 6:40, Times pressed snooze: 0 (my new alarm clock doesn’t have a snooze button), Actual time got out of bed: 7:13, Minutes spent searching for socks: 3.
On Wednesdays, film club meets in the art lounge, a large, cold room of windows and couches and a projection screen. We’ve started our movies by now: plotted them out on paper or in our heads, slipped a little tape into a camera, pressed record. The world through the lens is all our own. It can be anything we want, anywhere we want, anyone we want. Our theme is road trip. A road. A car. Some people. A story. The ideas flow like water let loose. The road becomes a field. The car becomes a pair of shoes. Some people become one person. A story – well, that remains the same.
Sonoma High has an excellent film department. I’m shooting my movie on a high definition camera and editing in Final Cut Pro. Says Gabe Bassett, junior, “The Sonoma Valley High School Film Club is a rare and incredible opportunity for young people interested in filmmaking to have access to some of the best technology in the business, and we are very lucky to have such a great program.”
If by March 1, we put together a complete film, two to five minutes long – lights, camera, action and all – we’ll get to see it played on the big screen at the Film Festival in the student works program. What makes a student film different from a regular film is not the quality or the story line, but the perspective. We’re young. Life is still this unrolling red carpet. Life is still the unexplored and unexplained. Says David DeSmet, actor, producer and junior at SVHS, “Never before in the history of the Sonoma youth scholar conglomerate has such a high level of cinematic, epicurean ecstasy and purity been reached.” In other words, at film club, we’re all about grapes, cheese and movies, just like everyone else.
