Deanna Caruso
Equinox Staff
A 30-minute film may seem like a short span of time, but to Marissa Grady that half-hour film is a short span of time filled with rewarding hard work and a sense of accomplishment.
As a film major and a psychology minor, junior Marissa Grady from New York will graduate in the fall of 2013; she is in the works of creating her film “A Matching Set” for her film production class.
The setting of the movie is located in New England and is based on a man named Grayson whose identical twin brother Mason dies. Grayson tries to figure out his own life as he deals with his mother who has Alzheimer’s.
The plot takes a turn when Grayson takes on the role of doubling as his brother Mason, to help his mom believe that Mason is still alive and in the process loses his own identity. Grady classifies this film as a “psychological drama” because the main character loses himself and then has to try and figure out who he is again.
Grady is not alone on this motion picture; she is joined by her crew of two others, Kim Christel and James Mitchell, who Grady said worked together as a team.
“We all did everything from directing, to sound, lighting and cinematography” she said.
The work was split evenly and each took on one-third of the task, Grady said.
What makes this project unique is that Grady’s group is the smallest crew ranking in at a total of three people, while the other groups have around six people to design and create a film for their Production 4 class.
Grady didn’t see this as a disadvantage because this allowed her group to “get more work experience and we got to know each other better on a professional level,” Grady stated.
According to Grady, the amount of work that went into “A Matching Set” required a lot of time and patience.
Taking the production class that began in the fall of 2012 was the first step to creating the film.
After that, the next few weeks were based on writing the script and revising. Next it was time for casting, Grady explained. Grady said she found the website Mandy.com where one can send out ads to find actors and actresses to star in the film. 
With the crew being located in Keene and casting taking place in Orange County, New York, Grady, Mitchell and Christel had to do auditions over Skype, “It was hard to do auditions over Skype because the actor is limited to just a small square box and the actor couldn’t perform as well as we’d like,” Grady said.
With just a week before filming the crew finally found the perfect actors for their film, Grady stated.
After a few months of scheduling and planning, the film was finally ready to come to life.
Over the very few weeks of winter break, “A Matching Set” was being produced. “We like to shoot as many of the same scenes as possible so we have options to choose from and trim,” Grady said.
She indicated this is a good strategy since having more to work with is better than little.
Right now the crew is in their editing stage in hopes of the film being completed by late March or early April.
With the struggles of crunch time and finding extras for the movie, Grady had her friends and family fill those roles; she found more benefits into making “A Matching Set.” “We had so much fun and everything worked out for the most part, I have a great crew to work with and enjoyed the experience,” Grady said.
One specific contest the film will be entering is the Keene Film Festival at the beginning of May.
All Production 3/4 students get a chance to display their short films and afterwards participate in a question and answer session. Grady’s crew plans on distributing their film to other festivals in hopes of it getting picked up, she said.
For Grady, filmmaking is a mixture of everything she loves tied into one.
“It’s a bunch of things I like to do such as art, theater and acting, I love storytelling and I love movies, so this is a combination of everything tied together,” Grady stated.
Come graduation time, Grady sees herself as a production assistant and eventually working her way up to a screenwriter and in ten years she sees herself, “Hopefully with a bunch of really interesting films under my belt or having a steady job and working for some television show.”
But, as of right now, Grady is focused on her film “A Matching Set” and couldn’t be any more pleased with how it has turned out.
Deanna Caruso can be contacted at
dcaruso@keene-equinox.com
