As a group of artists aspiring to learn and grow from the experience of a challenging project, Aaron Fitzgerald, Jordan Meeder, Andrew McGinnis, Graeme Little, Aubrey Thorlakson, and Nicolas Quigley came together at the beginning of the fall semester to begin creating a short film, called Telemachus.
Fitzgerald, the team’s director, said concerning the origin of such a project, “Jordan and I kind of had an idea about it, and had talked about it sort of seriously, sort of jokingly over the summer… but we didn’t do anything about it then… Then I sent out an email to him and a couple other people I thought might be interested, and we met, and that was it.”
Telemachus acts as a group undertaking for an advanced projects class, supervised by Professor David Huth, Visual Communication and Media Arts. The project’s production time spans the entire 2012-2013 academic year.
“We’re all doing the equivalent amount of work that would be involved in an individual project… most projects would encompass more aspects of the medium, but wouldn’t necessarily do as in-depth kind of stuff,” said Graeme Little, director of sound.
To explain the plot of Telemachus, Fitzgerald said, “I think the easiest way for someone to understand it, without revealing too much, is that it’s like a loose, modern adaptation of the first three or four books of the Odyssey, and then the last two books of the Odyssey… I wouldn’t say it’s a parallel story, but more of a character study.”
When asked whether the individuals in the group had ever attempted producing something like Telemachus before, Fitzgerald said, “Nothing like this. We’ve all done smaller, more independent projects.”
Meeder, director of photography, said of the project as a whole, “I think it was a challenge to learn to work creatively with other people because none of us had ever done that before… I think it’s a good experience, but it’s definitely something you can’t really plan for… It’s been more of a learning experience than we ever expected.”
Fitzgerald went on to say, “I think one of my ideas for this project is to give people who I think are gifted or invested in a certain way a cooler platform to showcase their work on, the kind of thing a lot of other majors have, but the communication major doesn’t necessarily.”
Since Houghton lacks a specific film department, the group’s goal to complete Telemachus acts as an experience and essentially an experiment of their own. As Fitzgerald said, “We didn’t do this because Houghton doesn’t have a film program; we just wanted to do something, and we thought that fact might be a good marketing platform.”
The team establishes its objective as principally gaining experience while deliberately challenging each of its members.
McGinnis, director of editing and effects, said, “I guess for me, the project is basically to get a large production under my belt, whether it turns out good or not. I can just say I helped with a film that was over fifteen minutes long, and basically adding that to my portfolio and seeing what it’s like to work in a team atmosphere.”
Little’s hopes for Telemachus parallel those of McGinnis as well. He said specifically, “I guess my goal for the project would be to best create something that… is not just my project anymore, but more like part of a larger project, which is like what any project is going to be in the real world.”
While the team hopes to eventually enter the film into film festivals in order to gain recognition, this aspiration comes second to the actual completion and experience of the entire project.
“I think our primary goal in this project is really just to learn and to try something that’s new and something that we’re not used to,” said Fitzgerald. “I think a good way of thinking about is not in terms of, ‘We’re doing this so that we can be known,’ but rather something like, ‘A good goal for us would be trying to get into a festival,’ and that could help drive us to do something better than what we’ve done before, and do something new and different from what we’re comfortable with.”