Big screen dreams: West teacher, grad team up to create short film

By JEN COWART
Posted 10/30/19

By JEN COWART Special to the Herald It all began with an Imaginative Writing class at Cranston High School West, where English Language Arts educator Evan Lancia is well known for engaging lessons and activities that bring students beyond traditional

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Big screen dreams: West teacher, grad team up to create short film

Posted

Special to the Herald

It all began with an Imaginative Writing class at Cranston High School West, where English Language Arts educator Evan Lancia is well known for engaging lessons and activities that bring students beyond traditional writing methods and into the 21st-century.

“I do a lot of different activities with my students in that class and in my Creative Writing class, like making podcasts, creating videos and writing scripts,” he said. “You might walk in and see kids stretched out on the floor doing their writing, or kicked back in a corner. It may look unconventional, but they’re creating, they’re writing, they’re all working.”

Lancia’s student at the time, senior Gianni Verduchi, began to thrive in the class, and his creative talents in the areas of photography, video making and editing quickly became evident.

“I’d had Gianni in my English 11 class, but I didn’t know he was talented in that regard until he was in my Imaginative Writing class,” Lancia said. “I could see he had untapped talents and skills.”

Lancia had written a script years ago as part of a master’s degree class.

“I had a ton of stuff in the vault, so to speak, and one of them was this script I’d written that had won a short screenwriting award and was a winner at a couple of little festivals,” he said. “I’d always wanted to be able to make it into a movie.”

And so began a yearlong project between Lancia and Verduchi to make that dream into a reality.

“Together, we created a 10-minute short film,” he said. “It took three or four months to shoot, and Gianni directed the film, shot the video and then spent hundreds of hours editing. He also did a lot of the scouting for shooting locations that would be right for the film ahead of time.”

The film, “Destroy and Rebuild,” is about to premiere at Cranston’s Artists’ Exchange on Nov. 20.

“It’s a film about two brothers. One really struggles in life and the other is doing very well,” Lancia said. “We also worked with my best friend, Noah Schnieder, who acted in the film with me. We just had a blast making it. It was such an incredible experience. Every day we learned something new. The technical side of things is not my strength.”

For Verduchi, this type of filming was new to him.

“It was the first time I was ever shooting something with plot and dialogue,” he said. “I had done a lot of travel videos every time we took a family vacation. With this one, we were trying to storyboard it.”

Together with Schnieder, the three began the filming process in January of this year, after Verduchi had gone location scouting.

“I went to eight different cemeteries before I found the right one that was the right size and location for the opening scene,” Verduchi said.

Lancia calls the process a labor of love, a long process with lots of revising throughout.

“The craziest part of all of this is how willing Gianni was to do all of this,” Lancia said. “That and the fact that this working relationship was built out of a class at school.”

Verduchi estimates he spent at least 80 hours editing the 10-minute film, and credits both his experiences in Lancia’s class at West and his Entrepreneurship program teacher at the Cranston Area Career & Technical Center, Richard Abruzzini, with pointing him in the right direction for what is now his future career path.

“Junior year, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. If it wasn’t for Mr. Lancia and Mr. A, I wouldn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said. “They both pushed me creatively. I took the year after graduation off and I have been networking, and I created a website with my photography, giannicreations.com, and I post the work that I do there. It’s portfolio work available for purchase. I do filters for videos and filters for pictures. When I go to college, I now know that I want to go into business management and pursue owning my own business full time. If it wasn’t for that class, I have no clue where I’d be now.”

As the filming progressed, Verduchi utilized a wider variety of equipment, expanding his expertise further.

“I used my drone to film the first scene. I used Mr. A’s boom mic to film part of the movie and my Canon 80D to do a lot of the shooting,” he said.

It was important to Lancia that the film have a proper premiere.

“I felt that [Verduchi] particularly put in so much work for this, and I felt we had to wrap it up properly,” he said. “I wanted it to be a special event for him as we wrapped it up.”

Although this film is finished, the group is already considering their next project.

“The next thing we might create is something really nostalgic,” Lancia said. “We want to work with an 8mm camera and do a short film like what you see in the beginning of ‘The Wonder Years.’”

Verduchi has already gotten the 8mm camera.

“It gives a really nostalgic look,” he said.

Beyond that, there may be a longer film in the works.

“I have longer scripts that I’ve been sitting on for some time,” Lancia said. “The films we are doing now are five to eight page scripts. I have one that is 96 pages, a full script.”

Lancia is grateful he has had the opportunity to see the talent that has come through his Creative Writing and Imaginative Writing classes.

“I have seen so much talent in those classes,” he said. “I’m always so impressed and inspired by the kids in those classes. The work they do in there is amazing. They are full-blown adults. The kids who have gone through those classes have done well in English Language Arts and want to continue to write and explore and try new things. They come in not sure what to expect, but once they’re into it, they love the class and they’re almost shocked to be enjoying it.”

“Everything in that class was something I was proud of and excited about,” Verduchi said. “He’d tell us to write about something we were passionate about. It didn’t feel like work.”

“I’m big on choice, there’s no script,” Lancia said. “These classes are about building relationships and even more so because of the open environment. I work hard to try to stay ahead of the curve, to bring new things to my students because I don’t ever want them to be bored.”

Now, the group looks forward to the Nov. 20 premiere as they showcase a project they are all proud of.

“I had a blast shooting this and I can’t wait to do the next thing,” Verduchi said.

Jen Cowart is a communications specialist for Cranston Public Schools.

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