Student show must go on, but online this year
Freeport is standing in for Bedford Falls, N.Y.
And if the Freeport Area High School students portraying George Bailey, Old Man Potter and the rest of the townspeople had to look cold while filming in 70-degree weather, well, that's why it's called acting.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation, school theatrical groups have lost the opportunity to perform.
Freeport High students came up with a creative solution for the show to go on.
The school is producing a pay-per-view version of Frank Capra's holiday classic, “It's a Wonderful Life.” The movie will be available for rent online and will be streamed during the weekend of Dec. 11 to 13.
Thomas Koharchik, the Freeport middle and high school chorus director and musical theater director/producer, started early in planning the production.
“I really kind of made my mind up in early August,” said Koharchik. “The first thing we had to do was get permission from the publisher to make a video, make a movie out of that.
“It was a matter of communicating what the idea was and getting everybody on board with that,” he said.
Because of social-distancing rules, the 20 student actors in the cast auditioned for their roles on Zoom.
Freeport senior Madison Beer, 18, who plays Mary Bailey said the Zoom auditions were different.
“There was a lot more work for it,” Beer said. “You had to audition for all the female roles. It was a little more work, but it was really cool.”
Koharchik said, “Rehearsing on Zoom was its own challenge. Acting on Zoom into a camera was actually more beneficial than if we were doing it as live theater production.”
Filming began the first week of November and continued until Nov. 14.
Filming locations included several houses on Freeport's Fourth Street that had the appropriate look for a story set just after the end of World War II.
Other properties included the Freeport United Methodist Church, the Charlton law offices and St. Mary's Cemetery.“We took actors out to McConnells Mill State Park and filmed on Eckert Bridge. It looked period,” Koharchik said.Tom Swisher and Cynthia Neff are owners of the Victorian home at 319 Fourth St., Freeport, that was used for several scenes in the production.“The house was built in 1875. It's what they call a Second Empire home with a mansard slate roof. The rooms are really big and old,” said Swisher, who has lived in the house for 12 years.“Tom (Koharchik) and I go to church together. I helped build sets on one of his plays. We know each other,” he said.So when Koharchik approached him to use his home as a location, Swisher said yes.The house's exterior and an upstairs hallway and three rooms on the ground floor were used in Freeport's “Wonderful Life.”Swisher said the hallway was used in a funeral home scene.The ground floor rooms served as multiple locations.“One room was, I believe, in George Bailey's parents' house. They put a desk in one and it was George's friend's office,” said Swisher.There was very little refurbishing. A doorway had to be blocked off to prevent the view of another room. A television had to be removed.“Our furniture is pretty old looking. They didn't have to change out any furniture or anything like that,” he said.Swisher even put up a Christmas tree and decorated a mantle for a Christmas scene.The filming took place a couple of hours a night over three nights.“It was interesting. It was kind of neat to see behind the scenes,” said Swisher.
The student cast and crew were careful of his property, he said.“They were gracious and polite. I told them, 'It's all right. Use the furniture.'”When the production couldn't find an appropriate location to stand in for the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan, Koharchik built one.He said, “There was an abandoned market on Fifth Street, a large, empty building. We were able to make a few sets, use it as a studio and it worked perfectly.”Location filming presented its own set of challenges.Lawn mowers and passing cars and trains would spoil takes. And the weather often wouldn't cooperate.Unseasonably warm weather presented some acting challenges.Koharchik said, “It's kind of different portraying winter and Christmas Eve scenes when it was 70 degrees out.”But the weather was appropriately cold and gray for a dialogueless scene shot in a cemetery with the cast gathered around a tombstone.Tawnya Lunz, broadcast communications teacher at the high school, provided the film crew.“We have a group of three boys in independent film study, the highest class you can take in media arts,” she said.
The crew didn't have a lot of equipment, just one light and one reflector, and tried to film in natural light as much as possible using Panasonic 4K cameras.But Koharchik emphasized the production is a full-blown movie, not just actors reciting lines to each other. There are pans, zooms and different camera angles.Jessica Kibler, 18, a senior at Freeport was the student director.She said, “I did of lot of sound for the shows. I made sure we could hear all the lines properly, and I looked at the shots we were taking, directed a couple of the scenes, which angles we were going to take.”“I had a script in case anybody would forget a line. And I helped actors decide how they were going to act the next scene,” she said.“We did most of it after school. We would start at five or six and go to eight or nine,” Kibler said.Lunz added that, as a teacher, she was excited for the opportunity to give her students a chance to use what they learned and apply it to stretch their abilities.The actors had to stretch as well.Koharchik said, “It's different for the actors to act in front of a camera as opposed to acting on stage.“It (the acting) doesn't have to be as big; some did have challenges with that but they were able to learn something new and step outside of their comfort zones,” he said.
Beer found it easier to act on camera.“It was a lot ... easier than being on stage,” she said. “If we didn't understand our lines or a scene, Mr. Koharchik could explain the mood. It helped because we didn't get a lot of rehearsal time.“It was more time-consuming but it was really cool,” said Beer.Koharchik agreed.“I found this to be much less stressful than a musical, because we can do multiple takes,” he said, making it easier to pick the best one.After a day's filming, an SD card would be delivered to Freeport senior Joel Wilson's house, who would assemble the footage on a computer with editing software.Wilson said, “It took a long time to go through the footage. They will have different angles. The actors will screw up a line and then stop and try the scene again.”Wilson is working from the script to assemble a final black-and-white cut.He said he's gone through the footage so much he can sometimes get sick of it, but “I'm superexcited about getting to edit this; I'm excited about making a movie. I want to do this as a career.”Right now, the Freeport High production of “It's a Wonderful Life” clocks in at about 48 minutes long, although Wilson expects the finished product will be pretty close to an hour.Koharchik, along with the cast and crew, can't wait to see their work on the screen.He said, “People's initial reaction was a little surprised. I could have gone for a small play on stage. I was ready to take on this new challenge and learn what I could from it.”
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