Junior Sophia Keele recently wrote and directed her first short film titled “Quite Contrary.” In the short, three minute film, fellow students senior Mary Healey and junior Walker DeWitt can be seen. The film was shot over the course of six hours on a Nikon DSLR camera and was edited that following week.
“I don’t have any expensive or fancy equipment so it takes me a while to edit,” Keele said.
The short film depicts a teen girl, played by Healey, running through a field with a car driving on a nearby road. When she gets into the view of the camera, viewers can see she is bruised as if she had been beaten. The car stops after she flags it down and although the man inside gives off an eerie look, she gets in the back of the car when he tells her to and promises to help her.
As they begin driving, he starts to question her and asks if she’s alone. She’s confused and her answers contradict one another. Then, in a twist, before he can ask any more questions, she strikes him over the head and the screen goes black. The film goes on for another minute and then the credits roll. Even though the short was less than three minutes long, it was shot and edited in a comprehensive and professional way.
“I’d always wanted to make a real movie,” Keele said. “I had done stuff on like iMovie but this was different and I was really proud.”
“Quite Contrary” was made for the International Thespian Society Festival for the short film category and it won the Tech Superior Award.
“It was my first professional movie and I thought it was cool that I was the only person from Westside who won a Tech Superior,” Keele said.
While at the ITS Festival, she and the other members of the short film category were a part of a group called Film Works and made another short film that was shot and made in only a couple of hours.
“It’s called guerilla filmmaking,” Keele said. “We didn’t have a permit and we had two actors, one of which was the brother of our cameraman. We were trying to film in the middle of a hotel. It was just a mess, but it ended up turning out better than we thought it would,”
The finished film was shown at the festival and it did so well that it was being played in the Film Streams Movie Theater up to the end of January.
Keele hopes to continue to make more movies in the future.
