| Movie magic created on campus BY MIKE UNGER 
Photos by Jeff Watts
The funeral is coming to its tearful conclusion. Kiera, seated next to her friend Sophie in the sanctuary of the United Methodist Church on Nebraska Avenue, leans forward ever so slightly in her pew before standing and heading toward the aisle. “Cut!” Mass, albeit organized, chaos ensues. Actors file back to their original places. Photographers and sound technicians check and recheck their equipment. Make-up artists and hair designers saunter onto the set to pat and primp. Perched behind a monitor to the left of the altar, Sarah Brandes, the digital imaging engineer, notices that Kiera, played by Leah Yananton, has but one eye in focus. Time for another take. When the scene is shot for the sixth time, Yananton leans back in her seat, gracefully ignoring the microphone taped to her back while managing to look distraught. In the end, it took more than an hour to capture this one minute and 45 second scene. Welcome to the world of feature films. It’s a new one for both Yananton, an artist in residence at the School of Communication, and SOC professor Larry Engel, despite the fact that the 26-year-old Yananton was nothing more than a twinkle in her mother’s eye when Engel started working in the movie business. “I’m a documentary filmmaker,” Engel says. “I never in my wildest imagination thought I’d be doing a feature. It’s a world that’s created, not a world explored. Working on one that’s created was not something I felt like I wanted to work on until Leah came along.” 
Roots of a screenplay Ask Yananton where she’s from, and she responds “nowhere.” As a child she moved frequently, bouncing from school to school, from New Jersey to the Florida Keys. It wasn’t until college, at Columbia University in New York, that she found a home. It wasn’t always a happy one. Working three jobs to put herself through college, Yananton hit rock bottom her junior year when financial problems struck and she split with her boyfriend. From this nadir came Apology, her first screenplay. “The actual idea came when I bit into a jelly donut,” she says from the kitchen table of her Bethesda apartment. “It comes from my experience of trying to make it on my own and feeling extremely alienated and isolated. I didn’t feel like I fit in.” For two years Yananton honed and revised her script, which centers around a female college student whose relationships spiral out of control. “It’s a work of fiction, it’s not autobiographical, but the themes are very close to me,” she says. “It’s consumerism at a personal level.” During her senior year, Yananton took a video production course at Columbia taught by Engel, then an adjunct professor at the school. “Leah was pretty quiet but observant in class,” he recalls. “She gave me the script, and I thought it was really good. It’s contemporary, it’s modern, it deals with important issues.” Through her persistence and determination, Yananton was able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars for the project, and when it became apparent that Apology actually was going to be made, she turned to Engel for help. “My joke always in class had been, and still is, ‘If you learn anything and come out of the course with a project that you’re proud of, hire me. I make a great PA [production assistant],’” Engel says, laughing. “Leah was the first to act on that.” 
‘A team effort’ With Engel on board as a producer and the director of photography, the pair began shopping for a location to shoot. Back in Washington, Engel ran into SOC dean Larry Kirkman, who enthusiastically invited Yananton on board and suggested that they film the movie at AU. When the 19-day shoot began last month in Anderson Hall, AU students were heavily involved. “There were two students who worked almost exclusively with the art department, a couple who were assistants to Leah [the director and a producer], and a camera intern,” Engel says. “We ended up with a bunch of PAs who really learned a lot.” Students in Professor Darrell Hayes’s public communication course are working on promoting and marketing the film, while Professor Russell Williams’s students are helping with the movie’s sound. “It’s joyful to see so many people involved,” Yananton says. “Everyone has embraced it, and it’s really a team effort.” This semester Engel is teaching a postproduction class in which the students are actually helping to edit the film. “You learn from doing student films, but when it’s a professional project you can get a better sense of where editing fits in with all the other roles in a movie,” said Brad Lambert, a MFA student working on the project. The three-plus weeks of shooting throughout campus were tedious, exhausting, and exhilarating all at the same time. Because of the low budget, about seven pages of the script were shot each day, more than twice the standard amount, but the professional crew and cast of accomplished actors helped move the project along at a lightning pace. Today, Yananton and Engel continue to race against the clock. They’re aiming to finish the movie by next month, in time to enter it in the Cannes Film Festival. The ultimate goal is to have it picked up by a distributor, and shown in theatres. “Honestly I think the script is great, the acting is terrific, the directing is great,” Engel says. “I think it’s playing out pretty well. Because it is a modified low budget, I think distributors are going to be very interested in it because it will be able to make money. I have great confidence that it’s going to be picked up quite quickly. “My mentor always said you are to be complimented for finishing your film. Anyone who finishes a film wins, doesn’t matter what happens to it. For me, the film’s already a winner. It’s been a winner from the beginning of working on it with Leah.” Check out Apology online at
www.longtalefilms.com. 
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