A student film titled “Orientation” has begun production. The film was written by Brendan Smyth, a senior.

Dr. Michael White, an assistant professor in the Communication Arts Department, is overseeing the film as a whole, as well as giving
advice on production.

“It’s kind of Hitchcock-like suspense/horror film,” said White. “It’s about a freshman that comes to school and has a really bizarre
experience with his roommate.”

They are hoping to have the entire production of the film complete by
Halloween, allowing them to have a showing on the day of Halloween.

“We went into production right away,” said White. “Brendan is the
executive producer and we give him a full crew and he decides on
everything. We will shoot like it is a cinema production.”

In addition to the suspense/horror genre the film will be presented
within the found footage subgenre as well.

“Honestly, I’ve always been a fan of the found footage films so I was
just thinking of an idea of how I can turn this into a college kind of thing just cause I thought it would be easier to shoot on a college campus because we are here,” said Smyth. “I just kind of started with a creepy roommate because some people deal with that and then where can I branch off of that to make a story around it.”

Seniors in video production brought multiple ideas forward to be reviewed and created as their senior projects. Smyth’s film was
chosen along with that of another student, Andrew Eaton, who is doing
a football pregame show.

“We had a couple of scripts come in and one wasn’t ready that I
pushed off until next semester,” said White. “Brendan’s script came in
and I OK’d it before school started and we gave him a full crew.”

Smyth held a table read for anyone willing to try out for the film
and able to act in it, allowing both students and faculty to participate. These as well as other preproduction elements have been going on since the beginning of school.

“We’ve just been doing a lot of storyboarding and preproduction as well as casting and getting the props ready,” said Smyth. “It’s been
fun, I’m pretty happy with the cast that we have and we got quite a few people to turn up for the table reads. We even got a few faculty members to do our parents.”

The cast will consist of four WSC students and two faculty members.

The film is still in preproduction and Smyth hopes to begin shooting
this Wednesday and to wrap up around the time of Halloween.