Lake Forest High School

The Lake Forest High School Telecom-New Media department won an audience choice award at the 48-hour film festival in Chicago. September 2010

The Lake Forest High School Telecom-New Media department won an audience choice award at the 48-hour film festival in Chicago. Through the encouragement of Lake Bluff parent and industry leader Tom Fletcher and LFHS Telecom-New Media teacher Steve Douglass a group of ten LFHS alumni were led through their very first experience with the national film festival. The group called “Scout Stories” was one of 57 groups made up of professionals and former film school students aspiring for their break into the industry.

Each group was given a genre, character, prop and line of dialogue to create a four to seven minute video during the two-day period. “Scout Stories” was randomly selected to receive Horror as their genre. LFHS Telecom-New Media graduates Connor Hartnett, class of 2007, Max Moore (Class of 2010), Lain Kienzle (class of 2010), Hunter Ries (class of 2009) as well as LFHS graduates Woody Taulke (Class of 2010) and Jackson Moore (class of 2007) began the ideation process at 9pm on Friday night. After a three-hour brainstorm session the group consensus was to introduce concrete story elements into a psychological thriller by using Plato's allegory of the “Cave” as its theme. Woody Tauke and Connor Hartnett were selected as actors to build the dialogue of the script around and by 2:00pm on Saturday, the six drafts of the script were consolidated into one. Lake Forest Hardware kindly agreed to offer their store as one of the two locations where shooting took place between 4:00pm – 4:00am. Max Moore co-directed with Connor Hartnett during the shooting and then Moore edited a first draft through the morning hours. He then uploaded the draft for it to be scored by Telecom-New Media graduates Hunter Ries and Alex Zeravica while "Foley" audio recordings were recreated (the art of creating sound effects using man made objects and inserting it into the soundtrack) by Rick Day and Cody Vandenberg. As Moore continued to edit and master the final draft everything was combined on Sunday afternoon and burned to a DVD for Douglass to hand deliver a full 28 minutes before the deadline.

"It was such a tremendous experience for the students and for me the highlight was to see all of my former students working together to create such a compelling visual story. The award was a nice surprise, but the beginning of a tradition for these, and other former students, to work together is what is really special."~ Steve Douglass

The short will also be screened at the Northshore Short Film Fest on Sunday Septemeber 26 from 6-8.