June 21, 2006 |
Spectacular Specter
Award-Winning Student Film Screens At LA Film Festival
Having garnered the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts/LA student film award, production alumnus Adam Parrish King is set to screen The Wraith Of Cobble Hill at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 25 and 27.
King, who graduated this spring with an M.F.A., directed the 15-minute black and white stop-motion short, which is situated among the cold, winter streets of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The film centers on Felix, his deadbeat mom and the decision the teenage boy must make when the kindly Mr. H asks Felix to take care of his store while he’s away on holiday.
“In a place like Brooklyn where so many people are living on top, under, and next to each other, you’re constantly hearing brief glimpses into your neighbors’ lives through the windows, floorboards, walls, and pipes,” said King about the inspiration for his film. “I wanted to write a story in which a character is trying to make sense of the sounds he hears from the neighbor above. The rest of the script followed from that.”
King’s wife Monique Zavistovski ’02, who produced and co-edited Wraith, encouraged her husband to submit the film to Sundance despite the daunting task King faced with finishing the sound design, shooting the credits, getting the negative cut, timing the film, designing the posters and post cards and scraping together a press kit just a month and a half before the festival.
He also had to overcome numerous trials and tribulations during filming such as walls being accidentally knocked down rendering weeks of shooting useless; negatives getting lost; and studio temps so hot that they melted clay figures used in the production.
Nonetheless, the road to festival success seems well worth the wait, according to King.
“It’s satisfying to forget about all of that and sit back in a dark theater with an audience and watch the story unfold,” King said. “I’m really thankful and surprised at the attention. And I’m happy that it’s been getting out there to a broad audience,” he added.
The Wraith of Cobble Hill plays in Shorts Program #2 at the Los Angeles Film Festival. For more information and tickets, log on to www.lafilmfest.com.
The next stop for the film is down under at the Melbourne Film Festival which runs from July 26 to August 13.
