By Dean Vaglia
Leader Staff Writer
A team of Oxford High School students took the top prize in the 2021 Orion Neighborhood TV (ONTV) Wildwood Film Festival on Wednesday, Oct. 13.
Held at the GQT Oxford 7 theater, the team of OHS students — Charlie Fracker, Zach Cabanillas, Keegan Upham, Jake Olhieser, Ryan Shick and Zach Call — won first place overall with their short heist film “Just Roll With It.”
“It’s about this rich guy,” Fracker said. “He participated in a bowling tournament some years ago and he gets cheated out of winning the bowling tournament and he recruits two guys — me and my friend Zach [Cabanillas] — to get the trophy back.”
“Just Roll With It” is available on YouTube.
The team has been a regular presence at the Wildwood Film Festival over the past few years. They competed in the youth category from 2017-2018, winning in their first year and placing second in 2018. They moved into the adult category in 2019, coming in second place that year.
The Wildwood Film Festival challenges participants to plan, shoot and edit a film over the course of five days — Oct. 6-12 this year — and are given certain items to use in the film.
“You get a line of dialog, an object you need to include in the film and a place you need to in the film,” Fracker said. “You get five days to film, write your script, all that. It’s stressful but we get it done.”
While the film itself is made over the course of a workweek, groundwork for the production is laid well before the official start.
“A lot of it we do in advance,” Fracker said. “We’ll start thinking of ideas for the movie about a week in advance [and] start getting the script down. We’ll start thinking of locations we want to shoot and things like that, and then we’ll get our requirements … and we’ll go from there. Things are tight, the weather doesn’t always agree, there’s unexpected things you have to deal with.”
12 teams took part in the 2021 competition.
Each of the team members are nearing the end of their high school years. Call is in 12th grade while the other members are in the 11th grade.
“We started a youtube channel when we were younger just filming literally anything that came to mind,” Fracker said. “Just little skits and things. I would just grab my camera and we would do whatever.”
As for what they’ll be doing beyond their high school days, Fracker says film school is not ruled out.
“I’ve been thinking about [film school] for a while,” Fracker said. “I’ve always been passionate about it. It’s always been something I really like to do and I think something that I’ve always been pretty good at … In the future it will definitely be a part of my life because I can’t see how it couldn’t be.”