UNCSA School of Filmmaking

Perhaps I’ve peppered some past blog entries with my interest in, support of, and pleasure regarding the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and especially the School of Filmmaking. Over the years, I’ve truly loved attending the Third- and Fourth-Year Film Screenings, marvelous productions wholly created by incredibly talented students at this hidden jewel right down the street from the house. One of the delightful elements of watching those is to catch sight of familiar buildings, houses, and locales since they are almost always shot here in town.

When I bought the Roediger House over 21 years ago, when the institution was called the North Carolina School of the Arts, a Wake Forest University colleague put the bug in my ear that I should let the School of Filmmaking know that here was a house of a certain age that would be perfect as a shooting location for student films that might benefit from it.

I repeatedly missed opportunities to mention this to key people when I had the chance, and benign neglect stayed my hand at others. Maybe 10 years ago, one student stopped to ask me about and tour the house but ended up choosing a location closer to UNCSA. First, excitement; then, disappointment.

The very sweet threesome of film students who caught the attentions of Sumner and Scarlett back on a sunny Sunday afternoon in late August brought about the renewed hope we could be helpful to a team in search of a filming location. What that culminated in is documented through the photos that will populate the rest of this post, as I tell the fuller story of this marvelous experience.

On that August morning, I happily brought them in for a tour and gave them the link for the house website gallery. They brought more of the team back the following Thursday for a full tour, discussion, and questions of me, all to help them decide if this place would work for them. Early the following week, they sent word that they wanted the Roediger House to serve as their primary filming location. I was very glad we passed the audition.

Within days, they scheduled another team visit, checking out the specific scene locations, running through a few moves and actions to visualize them, taking lots of notes, doing lots of internal discussion, and asking me a host of questions to make sure they had a good read on the house as well as the limits of our ability to accommodate their needs.

As the weeks proceeded, it became the pattern that a small team would ask for some location scouting time, and they’d come over and spend a couple of hours. In the early going, that was largely about scenes and staging and camera shots; once those were increasingly certain, the students coming over also included production and tech crew members. The final two weeks leading up to the actual filming dates meant someone (or someones) from the production was here nearly every day.

Then came the big three-day shoot, November 2-4. Theirs was an intense schedule of 12-hour-plus filming days, starting at noon each day, and then wrapping up around midnight.

This was a most welcome interruption to the Roediger House routines, with the greatest challenge being how to manage dogs with their multiple trips outside and with their excitement at so many busy people!

But the film crew was great about coordinating and communicating: we would send word and they were able to then let me know of a good filming break or transition moment.

New discovery: film production crew members perform a cascading call-out to alert everybody we were passing through by saying: “The dogs are flying!” We all worked around one another, and the dogs managed their rare leashed restrictions, for the greater good of film!

It was a marvel to watch all this incredible talent in all the many respects and elements, fully displaying their efficiency and coordination and cooperation and focus and enthusiasm.

They are exceptionally well-trained but it’s more than that. They must themselves be exceptional, because that’s what it takes to be admitted into this highly successful program and institution.

Can I also mention how they interact with one another? They are professional and unfailingly polite. They commend and celebrate one another. They offer feedback and notes to one another in a manner that is always encouraging and supportive. They collaborate seamlessly not only on the production and tech elements of the execution but also every bit as well on the creative vision in process.

Particularly noteworthy was the number of “Thank yous” and “That was amazing” comments (followed by “Now let’s try…”) as they communicated needs or directions or changes or fixes or feedback. Two of many cherries on top: hearing crew members who already had their own task list also readily offering to help share the load born by other crew members; and the inspiring million moments of mentorship by older students to younger ones. Seriously. These UNCSA students are really phenomenal.

I am scared to begin naming names because all of them deserve so much credit. (They’ll be acknowledged when the film’s credits are rolled in May!) But a project like this depends entirely on its leadership, and the director (and co-writer) Hoffman West was a marvel to behold; the Director of Photography Grant Kaufman was a genius; we also loved Sophia Alvarez-Cabrera, Kayla Guilliver, and all the other dept heads…plus Hollyn Gambrill and Luke Penny as our point people leading up to and coordinating/communicating during the filming. Two absolutely lovely moms were here part of the time as well, and they deserve all the pride welling up within while watching Hoffman and Grant work.

UNCSA also has pretty strict policies and guidelines that the students have to abide by. Their safety policies, the equipment and vehicle management, and even the end-of-day curfew join the expectations for stunningly detailed production plans and processes and these emerging filmmakers were unfailingly faithful to all those.

This old house is full of antique clocks and quite a lot of furniture. Did it escape unscathed from those three 12-hour days of 45 UNCSA students in constant motion and so much stuff moved around and with all that equipment and all the art and props?

You would be amazed. Oh, a scratch here, a nick there...and less damage from a full film production than what is regularly perpetrated by the lovely cleaning ladies!

And a word of acknowledgement and enormous thanks is due to our neighbors, accustomed as they are to the cascading effects on our street from evening restaurant clientele but also special events like the Veterans Day Parade that had wrapped up just before the first day of filming. As soon as I notified them of the film production taking place here, Phil Neari of Neari & Associates said: Use our lot on the weekend! And Will Brown of AlarmQuest across the street said: Here is the code to our gate so you can use our parking area! And neighbor Natasha said: My driveway will be clear if you need it! Ah, but clear is not good for those big windows of the front doors, when you’re filming and have lights that reflect and a view of a parking deck, so they’ve got a fix for that:

My three-part “condition” when use of the house as a set location was first raised was as follows: (1) tell me whatever you need or how I can help; (2) if we seem to be a usable/workable site, please spread the word at UNCSA; (3) share with me a copy of the finished film.

It was worth it to take down the highfalutin’ modern video doorbell and to (temporarily) restore the original one present when I bought the house, just to add that much more authenticity to the film.

It’s a fair trade-off, because I learned that “All keys to monitor!” is a command for department heads on the production to get to their assigned places to view the monitor, just before the start of filming a scene; and the Art Department might just happen to refer to itself as “The Pretty Committee.”

This was just a fun and educational and invigorating and enlightening experience. To have the chance to be around all this talent, and all this goodness within these aspiring filmmakers, was a gift I had no right to ask for. But there they were at the very end, bringing forth a concluding gesture of enormous generosity: