Q: Tell me a little bit about your educational experiences with film and directing.
A: Well, I’m originally from Florida. I have two graduate degrees in theatre, one from Florida State University and the other from Cal State Northridge. This is my fourth year working at Gardner-Webb University as a professor in the Communications department.

Q: How did you end up first becoming interested in film?
A: I started out with a degree in Divinity from Duke University. After graduating from Duke, I realized that I really wanted to get involved with religious media. Over my career in religious productions, I directed and wrote 40 films for a religious film company, one of which being “This Is The Life”, which was a video that was released for the use of the Lutheran church. After having spent some years there, I got a job doing freelance writing for Disney and Warner Bros. Productions. I wrote the movies “Child of Glass” and “The Sky Trap” for the Wonderful World of Disney series, and “Missing Children: A Mother’s Story” for Warner Bros.

Q: What made you decide that you wanted to make the Legacy?
A: While I was at Florida State, I taught a course called Acting for the Camera. During the first semester, we just did short little scenes. The second semester, we decided to try doing episodes of popular TV shows. By the third semester, we were feeling ambitious and decided to try making a full-length movie. The movie we ended up writing and producing was called “Blood Beast From Hell”, and it was basically a spoof of the whole horror movie genre. FSU has a woodsy place called the Reservation where you can rent lake houses and cabins and so we took a weekend, rented parts of the Reservation out, and shot the whole film that weekend. We were working day and night, all the time, but we were able to finish shooting the film by the end of the weekend. I think that the students learned so much from doing a complete project and showing it to their friends, their classmates, and the public.

My actual idea for The Legacy came from a project that one of my students, Chris Breedlove, did approximately a year ago in the TV News course that I was teaching. It was a fairly short project called “The Decker Ghost”, and it was a legend about a ghost haunting one of the residence halls on campus. That following summer, I wrote 75-page script based around the same idea as Chris’ story… I took some time to develop a plot, figured out some character motivations (such as why the ghost was still haunting the hall, etc.), and really developed a very thorough script. The Legacy isn’t really a horror movie, per se, there are just a lot of suspenseful elements that would lend to people incorrectly labeling it as such. I think one of the most valuable parts of this film is that it shows students the huge number of possibilities that are available with technology and equipment that’s already here at their fingertips. All of the editing work was done on Macintosh computers that can be found in our school’s computer lab.

Q: How many people auditioned?
A: About 26 people auditioned. There were a few people from off-campus that came to audition after seeing a notice that I had posted in an independent film board in Charlote, but it was mostly Gardner-Webb students that came to audition. One of my former students ended up playing a key role in the end of the movie. Often times, that’s the way film casting works: personal networking in the film industry is crucial. I think something great about making movies these days is the way that virtually anything is possible with the technology that has become readily available to us as directors, editors, and producers. There was a movie that was released over the summer called “Deep Water”, and no one can believe that it was done in nearly the exact same manner that The Legacy was made. It was largely a digital video process.

Q: What were you looking for during casting?
A: When you cast for a camera, whether film or tape, you have to be more conscious of “type”. It’s so much more important on camera than it would be on a stage. Oddly enough, I wrote the role of Ivy (played by Chelsea Quarfot) with the assumption that she would have to be very sharp-witted and funny, but not the most attractive character. After seeing Chelsea’s audition, I knew I wanted her, but I also realized that the part of Ivy would end up being sexier than I had originally thought. Chelsea brought a whole new character to Ivy that I hadn’t even thought about. It’s definitely important to be a little bit open-minded when you’re casting.

Q: Did any major problems arise during filming?
A: We only had four student helpers, and Chris (Breedlove) was really the only one with any production experience. I suppose an inexperienced crew was really the only major issue we had. Explaining everything to the actors got a little bit tough. They couldn’t see any of the digital special effects that we were going to be putting in, so they had a hard time acting surprised or shocked or scared or anything when they couldn’t see what they were supposed to be scared of. Scheduling got a little bit tricky at times, too, because of we had to schedule our shootings around everyone’s schedules as a whole, but mainly Katie (O’Neill, the lead role of Rebecca). Coordination could be really tough at times. But overall, it was an enjoyable experience. Nothing too bad really happened.

Q: How was working with your cast?
A: I had really good students working with me on this film. They did an extremely good job, and they all worked incredibly hard. They also took a lot of personal responsibility during the course of the filming. We didn’t have one person to be responsible for continuity, who would take notes on what people were wearing or what we did during that particular day’s shoot, so each actor really had to be conscientious about remembering what they wore the day before. We had a couple of slip-ups, but they were easily fixed. As a whole, I was very proud of the cast and the work that we did together.

Q: How long did the whole process for this film take?
A: The shooting of the film took about 4 _ weeks, and the editing took almost as long. The editing could be a tedious process… for some shots, I had to do layers and layers of video editing. For instance, making the ghost appear for certain scenes took lots of tweaking and quite a few attempts. Also, there were days where we’d be filming a rainy nighttime scene, but because of time conflicts, we had to shoot the scene at 1:30 on a sunny afternoon. The video editing process made it accurately dark and rainy, but it was still quite a process.

Q: How big was your budget?
A: I actually didn’t have a budget for the making of this movie at all. I ended up paying just about everything out of my own pocket. Most of the real expense, though, came from getting the DVD form of this movie copied and digitally mastered. I sent it to a mastering company out in California that does a really good job… they can match absolutely anything. They were especially helpful with those “nighttime” shots that we did in the afternoon. The lighting in everything came out really well, the image never breaks up or gets distorted, it really turned out great. However, it was the most expensive part of the production of the movie.

Q: What programs did you use for editing/photos/shooting?
A: FinalCut Pro. It’s a really remarkable program; we have it on about 20 computer around campus, including eight or so in the Macintosh labs. This program can do absolutely anything you want it to do. It’s great.
“As a final note… looking back, I’m still amazed that we pulled this off. It’s one of the most audacious things to say, that ‘we’re going to go ahead and make a feature film in a couple of months.’ We have no film program here at Gardner-Webb, and so it seemed a little bit unrealistic, but we managed to get it together quite nicely. The upcoming invitational screening and public showing is going to be interesting, seeing as we didn’t actually make this movie to be put on a huge screen. It’s DVD and digital, it wasn’t made on film. It’s going to go well, though, I’m sure. I think with any form of art, you can always find something to change or to fix, but after a certain point you just have to let it go and be happy with it. And fortunately, there’s a lot to be happy with here.”