WISD student-made movie to premiere at Texas Theater
- Charity Fitch
- Aug 29, 2023
- 5 min read
While most Waxahachie ISD students and teachers are enjoying their summer break, the cast and crew of “PerFection” are still working to complete their student-made movie, which they’ve been working on since fall 2022.
David Moore, CTE Audio/Video/Media instructor of Waxahachie High School, said when he took over the class, he asked his students what they wanted to do. To which they responded, let’s make a movie.
Over the past six months, Moore’s students have shot multiple 12-hour filming days and spent countless hours editing at school and at home, and on July 14-16, the movie will premiere at The Texas Theater. It will be the first movie to premiere at the historic theater since 1985.
“It’s all student done,” Moore said. “Every single piece of it is student done. Besides me being the instructor, the teacher, I just guided, and if I saw major mistakes, I spoke up, but they’re never going to learn if they don’t just do it.”
The students worked together to write the script for the hour-long movie, “PerFection,” which follows siblings Harper and Daniel Sinclair, played by Hayden Motta and Cole Spitzer respectively, as they move to a Texas suburb after their parents’ death. With an expectation to be perfect, Harper begins to question her uncanny encounters and discovers the true intentions of the town.
“She’s thrown into this situation where she’s trying to live this new normal life, but she keeps having these strange encounters where everyone’s trying to preserve this idea of perfection, and she doesn’t necessarily fit that,” Sarah Barker, director, said.
As the director, Barker works with both the actors and the crew to create a cohesive vision.
“In post-production process (when) we’re going through and we’re editing, that’s when I feel like I really do have a voice,” Barker said. “It’s more specific than just cutting a clip right here or music goes here. It’s figuring out what the order should be and if this is actually right and does it make sense, which is really fun.”
On set, Brock Fritz, audio mixer, works around the camera and Andrew Ardle, director of photography, to capture the audio, despite any obstacles in the way.
“Behind the scenes is really where it starts to come out a lot,” Fritz said, “Audio is really where it is for horror movies, so finding music, finding certain sounds like Cole and Hayden, might have a sound and that’s like their whole sound the whole movie and just keeping it connected to them, making sure that it works with them is a big part of it.”
Fritz is editing the movie in 5.1 surround sound and has learned how to balance the left and the right sides. Ardle oversees the camera during filming and is editing the video portion of the movie.
“Editing wise, I do work with Sarah a lot to make sure the scenes are edited right to make sense like Sarah said and making sure it all comes together the way we all want it to,” Ardle said. “So that it’s not like a movie that has a point, but it’s a movie that has an artistic vision. It has its own style.”
Ardle has worked on small movies with his dad in elementary school and said this is something he wants to do in the future.
One of the main challenges for the cast of “PerFection” was keeping their character consistent over months of filming.
“We had a different script than what we finished with,” Spitzer said. “It was filming those scenes … and then changing dialogue later and having to keep the character consistent to what I did before.”
“She (Ivy) wants to be accepted too, and I feel like the challenge with doing that is one staying true to that and being consistent throughout the film,” Kylee Hix, who plays Ivy, said. “Sometimes I’d rewatch what I’ve done, and I’m like could I have done it better? There’s so much room for interpretation and improvement.”
The Mystery Character, played by Noah Elsom, was written into the script following Elsom’s audition.
“I didn’t know anything about the character until it was written, and even then, things were changing all the time and new plot points were being added and things about my character’s motivations were changing,” Elsom said. “It’s going to end up being all right because since the mystery character was very mysterious to me, hopefully it will be that way to the audience.”
Originally the movie was only for high school students, but Motta, an eighth-grader at Finley Junior High at the time, heard about the auditions from Moore’s daughter and sent in a self-tape audition. Moore said all his students watched the audition tapes and voted on who would play each character.
“For the main role, she got so many more votes than everybody else, so it was very clear that she was going to be our main character,” Moore said.
“I was so surprised because when he told me it was just supposed high school students, I was like oh, OK, there’s no way I’m even getting a role at all, then he showed up at my school,” Motta said.
Since many of the students had never made a movie, the process of creating the movie was both a challenge and a learning opportunity.
“This has been like an uphill battle and struggle,” Moore said. “It should have stopped like several times. If everybody here was average, it would have stopped, but they’re not.”
“You learn off of each one of the other actors and then you put it into your own style and way of doing things,” Spitzer said. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s to be a better actor.”
Elsom, who is an award-winning actor in the WHS theater department, said he had to learn how to work around a camera.
“It was definitely a learning curve, going from theater to film,” he said. “In theater, you go all through it at once, and with this, you get to perfect the small, little details.”
Morgan Lenamond, who plays Olive, said the experience has been so rewarding because they have overcome obstacles and have been working on the project for months.
“Since it is a small student-run project, I feel like as actors, we’ve gotten to be a little more involved in the process than typical,” Lenamond said. “We’ve all learned more about the full process of making a movie and what goes into it on all sides as opposed to just what we’re doing in our scenes. It’s a cumulation of months of work and creativity and we’re going to have this final product. It’s going to be out there, and it’s going to stay out there.”
Barker said the project would not have happened without Moore as their teacher.
“I just don’t think any other teacher would give their time so gracefully in the way that he has because it’s crazy,” she said.
The movie premieres to the public July 16, with three showtimes at 2 p.m., 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., at the historic Texas Theater. Tickets are available at https://www.ticketsource.us/waxahachie-isd-cte. To view the trailer, visit https://youtu.be/3ofgjZD2SQw. For more information, follow @Whs-cte AV-Pro on Facebook and @whscte_avpro on Instagram.
Comments