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New Hampshire Film Expo provides local opportunity for screen time By Gina Carbone, spotlight@seacoastonline.com Who: New Hampshire Film Expo Where: Adams Memorial Opera House, 29 West Broadway, Derry, NH When: October 11-14 Tickets: $10 half-day pass Call: 603-621-4189 or visit http://www.nhfilmexpo.com Enough of this chatter. Go see some films. Local films. We love to babble on and on about filmmaking around here, but last year a group of Granite Staters got together and decided to actually do something. How 'bout that? Unleashed from the celluloid-saturated minds of some plucky Derry-area filmmakers was the first annual New Hampshire Film Expo (NHFX). A quiet, little affair attracting some 2,000 people to downtown Derry last September, the NHFX showcased more than 40 films from all over the country, including many from Seacoast filmmakers. According to NHFilmExpo.com, "the goal of NHFX is to bring together the visual arts community to celebrate the art and craft of film- and video-making in and around the New Hampshire area." This year's NHFX runs from Friday, Oct. 11, to Monday, Oct. 14, at both the Adams Memorial Opera House and Veterans Memorial Hall in Derry. Featuring 68 films from around the globe and various workshops ranging from film law to directing actors to guiding young filmmakers to editing and film marketing, everything about this year's expo is bigger and better. "It sort of just happened," says NHFX communications director Dan Hannon of the mad growth. "The word of mouth has been spreading since last year. We were able to do a lot more advertising, and the submissions basically doubled. We got so much good material we didn't want to leave a lot of it out, so the screenings increased by 50 percent." They also changed the schedule around a bit to add a fourth day (and take advantage of the holiday weekend) after some earth-shattering audience feedback. "Last year one thing we found was attendance was not great early in the morning." Shocker! "So the days are shortened but we added an extra day." Perhaps this is a good time to mention that many of the "films" are not films, but videos. The festival has a pretty even mix of 16mm, 35mm and video, with one film mixing 16mm with video. Shooting in video is often less expensive, more accessible and easier to use than film, though film is still considered by many to have higher quality than video. OK, enough film snobbery. Since this is the New Hampshire Film Expo, the coordinators made an effort to court local filmmakers with the help of the New Hampshire Film Office. Out of the 68 features, short comedies, short dramas and documentaries, 13 are from the Granite State, one is from Maine and five are international films. "NH Film Expo is now international," Hannon marvels. "That's definitely the beauty of the Internet." A beauty that allows a French short drama shot on the streets of Paris called "L'Etretien" to find a place in the NHFX lineup opposite a documentary from New Jersey called "Catching Fire." "There's one from Ireland called 'Magdalen' I want to check out," says well-known local filmmaker Jeff Palmer of Dover, whose feature "On the Fringe" will show at the festival on Saturday. "I'm looking forward to seeing shorts. Short movies — they're always interesting to me. It's good for me to see you can tell a story in eight minutes or 10 minutes. I've always been drawn to telling longer stories." He's says he's also looking forward to seeing "On the Fringe" co-star Bill Humphrey's documentary called "In Focus: A Celebration with Photographer Arthur Griffin," hosted by author John Updike and produced out of Eliot, Maine. This will be Palmer's second festival with the film he completed last December. "On the Fringe" played earlier this year in Memphis. "It played down there but this will be a chance for a lot of people in the New Hampshire area to check it out on the big screen." Not only will Palmer be at the NHFX to see audience reaction to his locally based film, he'll also be donating his time as a volunteer. "I wanted to help those guys out because it'll be a pretty big event," Palmer says. "I figured, what the heck?" What the heck is pretty much what Michael C. Nicholas of Dover said before launching into this new filmmaking endeavor. A furniture designer and builder in South Berwick, Maine, Nicholas came into filmmaking after a love of computers left him wanting more. "I got to the point where I had taught myself everything I could," Nicholas says. "There wasn't much left to do so I signed up at New Hampshire Community Technical College in Stratham and took nearly every multi-media class they had. I assumed I'd end up being a 3-D animator and go work at place like Disney, but I quite by accident fell in love with the video equipment and video editing." And from that love Nicholas birthed two short films making their debut at the festival: "Loyalty" and "Decisions, Decisions." "Other than practicing, they are my first official films." And his co-workers are going out of their way to be supportive. "I make them suffer through everything I do," he laughs. "They like to watch my movies. They read my scripts. My boss even let me cut back my hours so I could devote more time to work on movies." Both of his films were made with a small crew (including his daughter) and professional actors, though Nicholas calls "Loyalty" the more ambitious of the two. "I wrote the kind of movie that I like to see: it has a surprise ending, and it's a movie you have to think about while it's happening." Nicholas has a feature film in the works but plans on focusing on all the short films at the NHFX. "I won't miss any of the short movies. I was at last year's festival during the pre-production of 'Loyalty.' I caught nine shorts in one day and had a blast." One can only imagine the blast Christian Wisecarver of Exeter had while making his film "The Red Brick Road." Written while still a visual and media arts major at Emerson College in Boston, Wisecarver shot the film right after graduation in 2000 and edited it at his parents' home in Atkinson. "I'm in it and the other lead actor in it graduated from UNH," Wisecarver says. And in an interesting production side note: "All crew and major players were all roommates of mine at one time or another." Since the coming-of-age story takes place on a cross-country road trip, Wisecarver and five others hit the road for production. "We made it out to L.A. in four days," he says. "We didn't do a whole lot of sleeping." He figured the NHFX would be a good place to start as far as festivals go, since a good portion of the feature was shot in New Hampshire and Maine. If you're going to see the film in Derry, look for Wisecarver in the audience, checking for reactions. "That's pretty much the biggest reason for going," he says. "I'm just really excited to show it. We worked really hard on it. It's pretty much been my life for the past two years, and I'm excited to get some audience feedback." Lest we forget the female voice of filmmakers, young Oyster River High School junior Elizabeth Santos of Durham reminds us with her first film, a music video called "The Life of Marianne." The short film follows a day in the life of a student at Phillips Exeter Academy. That friend happens to be Santos' friend, Marianne. "I was in a video production course at school," Santos says. "I had an assignment to do a motion kind of story." After lots of planning, Santos spent a day of filming in Exeter and had her uncles help her with the music. She sang the vocals herself. Though it wasn't her initial plan to have it shown in public and she may focus more on music in the future, the idea of being in a film festival is pretty cool. "Over the summer, I think in July, my dad had seen this festival thing and said 'Hey why don't you put this in?' Then I got a letter that it was accepted." Sometimes it's that simple. Given the early stages of the festival, it's not quite yet a place for films to find distribution, says NHFX's Dan Hannon. Say, 10 years from now, if the festival is still going, that's definitely where they want to be. This year, filmmakers can aim to win one of the awards handed out at the closing ceremony on Monday at 4:30 p.m.: Best Feature Film, Best Documentary, Best Short Drama, Best Short Comedy and Best Screenplay. "They have a chance to win an award and have films reviewed and build a fan base," says Hannon. "It serves a great purpose. That's why a lot of us go to festivals."

Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out.  But I can usually shut the bitch up with cookies...Cora Harvey Armstrong