With just 72 hours to write, shoot and edit a three- to seven-minute short, three Locust Valley High School filmmakers –– Raffaele Giannattasio, Justin Kwok and Dean Wolfe –– turned a weekend challenge into an award-winning film. Working under the name Piejinks Productions, their project —“Chronicle of a Boy Displaced” — earned Best Use of Character at the Long Island 72-Hour Film Festival held Oct. 24 at Five Towns College.
“We’ve all made films independently and this presented a challenge to test our creativity,” Wolfe said. “Seeing it live and watching everyone react so positively to our film was incredibly rewarding. That’s what you live for as a filmmaker.”
The festival kicked off at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 17, when each team was assigned a unique prompt with a genre, a character name, a prop and a line of dialogue. For the Locust Valley trio, that meant crafting a story around a hairbrush, the genre mockumentary and the line “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Within two hours, they had a full script written and ready to shoot.
“The whole challenge was being concise and quick,” Kwok said. “Normally my films would take months, but this one taught me how to work faster. I also learned more about the tropes of documentaries, and it made me want to keep experimenting with that style in future projects.”
The film follows Brody Bruce, played by Wolfe, an “eccentric storyteller,” who finds himself transported into another dimension where he meets an alternate version of his sister, Bannière Bruce, portrayed by classmate Laura Warner.
The team used the hairbrush as a vehicle for storytelling, serving as both a mock-interview microphone and a sci-fi portal between worlds. Giannattasio said that focus on character development set their entry apart from others in the category.
“We made a whole family for Brody Bruce,” he said. “Nobody else did that, so it probably made the judges vote for ours because it was unique.”
The open-ended prompt and fictional genre gave the students room to experiment beyond their usual narrative style. Wolfe said it let them “include [their] own personal creative strategies” while meeting the project’s requirements. All three helped write the script. Wolfe took on the lead role, Kwok directed and handled post-production editing, and Giannattasio oversaw cinematography.
“Filmmaking is hard, but they embrace the content, so it never looks like work for them,” said Roger Boucher, Locust Valley High School media and communications teacher. “Their creativity is just outstanding. This is one of the groups that will definitely be most remembered for my time doing it.”
The group said this experience is just the beginning for Piejinks Productions. They plan to keep collaborating through the rest of the school year, “taking it to another level” and applying what they learned from the 72-hour challenge to larger, more ambitious projects.
“In high school film, you’re not shooting for the grade, you’re shooting for the moon,” Wolfe said. “By the time we graduate, we’ll have a full portfolio that shows everything we can do as writers, directors, actors and editors, and that’s just beautiful.”
