My freshman year of college was 2020, also known as COVID year. Much like the rest of the world, the university was having a hard time figuring out the CDC regulations and how to exist as a school during the pandemic. For this reason, it was really hard to get involved and make friends like you are supposed to in your first year of college. My classes were online, I couldn’t invite people to my room, I didn’t know what anybody’s face looked like under the masks, and every time I joined a club, it would get shut down within a week.
I decided I needed a project to keep me engaged and not depressed. I heard that ACU had a short film festival every year and decided that I wanted to give film a try. I had been a photographer for most of my life, but I had very little video production experience, so I thought it would be a fun learning experience. I reached out to a few of my friends who I thought may be interested in working on a film with me and we got started writing a script.
We had no idea what we were doing, and we just dealt with things as they came up. We decided we wanted to do a murder mystery which meant I had to figure out how to create a believable ensemble cast in under 10 minutes. I thought the writing was the hard part until we tried scheduling all of the student actors and crew members to be available at the same time. It turned out to be an almost impossible task.
After weeks of failed scheduling attempts, we finally decided to set the date way in advance for the week after spring break. We secured campus housing and coordinated so that everyone could arrive early to school for a few days of filming. We thought we had finally figured it out. Everyone showed up early and we had the location and equipment all ready to go, but when we arrived so did the Great Texas Blizzard of 2021 that knocked out power to most of the state. So alas, we couldn’t film and we just had to have a snowball fight instead.
We rescheduled and finally managed to film on the last week of school before the summer. We went into the editing process and I worked with a music major friend of mine to write the score. Although we had to submit the film to the festival our sophomore year, the award ceremony in the historic paramount theater was well worth the wait. In total, Face Down won six out of the eleven awards (Best Picture, Director, Writer, Editor, Actor, Actress).
Overall, making Face Down ended up being one of my favorite experiences of college. I learned a lot about the process of film production, working through conflict with other creative people, and my own love for storytelling through the medium of film.
