Curtain Rising
When short film “Level 23” wrapped production in the spring, Wade Ferrari of Butler felt relieved his college thesis project was finished.
“My two partners (in class) and I had started talking about the film in February 2012,” the 22-year-old said.
The trio planned to “go bigger” than anything else they’d done to date.
So they built a full size sound stage in the basement of a warehouse. They spent about $12,000, which they accumulated by fundraising.
Ferrari was an executive producer and cinematographer on the film.
The 20-minute science fiction film received the award for the best film in the class, he said.
“The story follows a creature brought back on a spaceship from Venus,” Ferrari said. “Basically, it can exactly replicate any human it touches. So the spaceship comes back with the captain on it but ... No one actually sees the creature because ...” Ferrari leaves some questions unanswered.
Ferrari said he thinks about science fiction this way: “The genre has unique characters that are fantastical and out of this world, but the morals and values that come out of them are things we deal with in life.”
The 2009 Butler High School alum graduated from Ithaca College in New York in the spring with a bachelor’s in cinema and photography with a concentration in cinema production.
Currently “Level 23” is undergoing more editing and color correction. Soon it will be submitted for viewing at places such as Slamdance, the Austin and Toronto film festivals, and the Cannes International Film Festival.
While he was still in college, he had the contacts and good fortune to work as a camera production assistant on Marvel Studios’ “The Avengers,” Walden Media’s “Won’t Back Down” and 20th Century Fox’s “Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader.”
For the “Narnia” film, Ferrari was in Australia for three months and then returned for college.
“It’s such a huge and kind of serious industry, but once you get to meeting people, everyone knows everyone,” Ferrari said.
He cited his time at Butler High School as a motivating factor for his career.
“BHS has a really great program,” he said. “That’s where I decided to go to film school. (Teacher) Erik Robbins taught really good fundamentals. I had two or three classes with him. He was constantly pushing you to do your best.”
Ferrari recently got a call to go to New York for seven weeks to work on a series called “White Collar Brawlers” about former white collar employees who want to become boxers.
“They shot in Pittsburgh and I was with them there and now I’m going to New York to work with them again,” Ferrari said.
He’ll be back in Pittsburgh later this month to work on a feature film based on a book, though he can’t announce the title yet. He is the son of Kelly and George Ferrari of Butler.
