White premieres first feature film

‘Ever Fallen’ stars WSC’s Shelby Hagerdon

Morgan Cardenas, Staff Writer

After a year of filming and editing, “Ever Fallen,” directed by Michael G. White, assistant professor of communication arts, premiered Oct. 1 at Wayne’s Majestic Theater and will have a second showing Oct. 2 at 7 p.m.

The film is about a young girl named Julie, played by junior Shelby Hagerdon, who struggles with her relationship with her mother, White said. Her mother comes from a wealthy family and expects her to marry a rich husband and achieve high grades. Pressure from her mother causes Julie to snap.

She meets another girl who leads her into a world of rebellion which later leads to a love triangle involving both girls and a boy she meets through the girl.

“It’s a film about love and self-sacrifice and selflessness,” White said. “It’s about wanting to be seen, wanting to be understood.”

Ever Fallen is derived from White’s previous short film, “The Ghost in Her.” “The Ghost in Her” was about an adult couple who had a relationship in high school. The new film was made after the audience continued to ask about the characters.

“After ‘The Ghost in Her,’ I loved the crew that I worked with so much on that,” White said. “I really wanted to work with them again and I wanted to make a feature film.”

A feature film is a full length movie, making “Ever Fallen” an hour and 15 minutes long. This was White’s first time personally working on a feature film of his own. The crew that worked on this film included over 120 people.

“Wanting to push myself was part of the reason for doing it,” White said. “Actually it was a tenure project. It was something for my tenure portfolio and I wanted something grand for my tenure portfolio and what’s more grand than making a full length movie?”

Hagerdon said the character she played is an inner punk girl pretending to be in a rich world that she had been put in to.

“She’s kind of a complicated character. I see a lot of myself in Julie,” Hagerdon said. “She has this grand transformation and she has a lot of issues in her life and she snaps. I kind of took it in a different direction than what was intended. She’s such a complicated, yet, simple character and it’s realistic.”

WSC sophomore Ally Boyd was the colorist for the movie and controlled how the scheme of the movie played out. Boyd said that each shot can take a different process in order to get the picture just right.

“How Mike likes color in his movies is he likes it more on the darker side,” Boyd said. “He likes to bring in a lot of black and I worked that into the coloring.”

Boyd is also directing a short film called “The Offer” starring Hagerdon that is centered on an unconventional romance. Her film will premier Nov. 19.

After the Oct. 2 showing, the film can be seen again on Oct. 3 at 5:30 p.m. at the Promenade Theater in Sioux City as an official selection of the Sioux City Film Festival. White plans to tour the movie through festivals and is looking into distribution options.