In 2007, my best friend told me about this open call for crew internships for a local production, "The Voices Project Movie" (now, "Shout It Out"), in Burlington, Vermont. Having been in Vermont for a little less than a year, I confess I didn't know anything about "The Voices Project", a widely acclaimed play (got raves even from The New York Times and won the 2005 Vermont Community Award from the Vermont Agency of Human Services) written during a yearlong statewide research with more than 1000 teens. This "real High School Musical" (developed much before Disney Channel's abhorrent TV movie) toured several Vermont towns during the fall of 2005, and both the movie and the play deal with serious issues that a Disney Channel flick would never dare to talk about: racism, homophobia, drugs, suicide, bullying, etc.
So, with no previous experience in the medium, but with a life passion for film-making, I got the internship. Unfortunately, I couldn't be on the movie set every day because a) I couldn't always get a ride to Jericho, where it was filmed; b) I still had to keep working full-time at Moe's (doing dishes in a busy restaurant - how cool is that?) in order to pay the bills. But every minute I spent on the set was precious, and the whole experience was unforgettable. I felt a little frustrated that, knowing a lot of theories but having no technical experience with camera/lighting et al, I couldn't always be as useful as I'd like to; but the other crew guys (film students or graduates) were very nice and supportive, and tried to teach me some basic tricks, even though most of the time they had to do all the hard procedures themselves, since we had a tight schedule and they didn't have time to teach me everything. But it was my very first experience on a movie set and we have to start somewhere, right? Sometimes I would just stand and look... trying to absorb everything I could! The great energy on set - the amazing director/co-writer, Bess O'Brien, producer Morgan Faust, the talented cast, choreographer Rainey Lacey, and so many other people working for little or no money at all, just out of love and passion for what they were doing (shooting a low budget musical with dozens of kids with no experience in front of the cameras in one month is quite a feat!). This is the beauty of independent film-making, of what doing some really artistic, entertaining, and that has something to say. You can say I'm biased, of course, which is understandable - who would diss a movie they worked on? I confess I was afraid I wouldn't like the final cut, because I'm very critical and even though I didn't direct or write "Shout It Out", I feel like it's my movie, too. And it is - cinema is made of a huge team, and all of us are part of it. And, thank God and our amazing team, I loved it. You can buy the DVD through www.kingdomcounty.com
