Grace Giffune, Director
by Peter Currier, WSU Intern ’17
WESTFIELD – Making a movie is no simple task, and outside Hollywood, nobody knows this better than Grace Giffune and her crew of New York University students.
Giffune is a senior at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a Westfield native working on her senior thesis. However rather than spending days on end typing away at a word document, she spent a week in March sitting behind a camera directing a short film.
The film, titled Unprotected, tells the story of Shay, a pregnant 17-year-old who does not know who the father is begins to develop superpowers.
Rather than film on campus in New York, Giffune chose to do most of the filming in her hometown of Westfield. She made this decision after considering the resources available in both locations.
Leanne Velednitski, lead actress
“We got our locations either for free or at a much lower rate than you’d find in the city, and we were able to work with local restaurants to feed the whole crew,” says Giffune, “Everyone around here was so willing and excited to help us, so it took a lot of the stress of planning and coordinating down ten notches.”
One day of filming was a bitter cold, rainy March morning in Westfield, the kind of day where Stanley Park would typically be quiet and empty of patrons. Instead the silence was punctuated by the sounds of director Giffune giving directions to her actors and crew.
The uncooperative weather in Stanley Park did not deter the young filmmakers. They spent several minutes clearing a patch of snow so they could film a brief fight scene, and took great care to make sure their camera
Krista Ray, Writer
was covered at all times.
The screenplay was written by NYU graduate Krista Ray for a feature film writing class in her final semester. However she did not have the chance to film it until Giffune approached her.
“We’re pretty much collaborators,” says Ray regarding how she gives input to Giffune, “I bill myself as the creative producer because I’ve been involved in casting, costumes and many of the other aspects of filmmaking.”
Celeste Erlander, producer
Unfortunately for Giffune, the film does not have the budget of a multi-million dollar Marvel film. They were operating on an estimated budget of $15,000 set by producer Celeste Erlander. Most of their money has come through donations.
Giffune and Erlander managed to make the relatively small budget go a long way. To save money they used a single Sony F5 camera.
“In an ideal world I would have another camera,” says Cinematographer Grant Johnson, “we can shoot one scene from multiple angles at the same time rather than having a single scene be shot many times from one angle at a time.”
To further save money the crew had to choose carefully where to film. “We used Grace’s house, her friends house, some public streets, and Grace’s Dad’s warehouse in Chicopee,” says Erlander, “We were going to get a hospital but we actually got Grace’s friends house to look like a hospital room.” For the Stanley Park scenes they had to rent out both pavilions while they filmed next to the playground.
Grant Johnson, Cinematographer
Of course you cannot have a movie without actors and actresses. Leanne Velednitski, a graduate of NYU, portrays the main character Shay. “I knew some people on the team and they had seen me in a film that I did last year,” says Velednitski, “I got through two auditions and they called me back and said they wanted me.”
The film also uses special effects, which for much of the talent and crew is a new concept. Isa Ghaffari is the special effects supervisor for the film.
“We’re using After Effects for the most part,” says Ghaffari, “For a small animation part we are using Cinema 4D.”
Ghaffari has experience making visual effects and animations however she doesn’t often get to do so for a large project like this. “It’s nice getting out and being with a group of people working hands on with the set,” she says.
Practical effects are still important in today’s CGI heavy film industry. For one of the final fight scenes between characters Shay, Ban-She, Brainbasher, and Doc Rumble, the team used a warehouse in Chicopee set up to look like a villains lair. Bubble wrap and fake wires hung from the ceiling while a light was set to flicker on a controlled loop.
In order to make a character look like they were running at high speed they used a leaf blower while he was running to affect the environment around him.
Making a feature length film, especially on such a small budget, was a learning experience for everyone involved, especially Giffune. “The most difficult part was getting everything together to shoot,” she says, “we had to raise the money for the budget, find all of the cast and crew. It was very hard and very stressful.”
“But once I got on set I thought ‘wow, everything is fine.’”
Unprotected will eventually be posted on Vimeo, a video hosting site similar to YouTube, but not right away. “We will only really release it for people to see after we’ve submitted to festivals,” says Giffune “The top tier festivals typically want to have world premier rights so we have to keep this film to private viewing only until we know if we’ve been accepted or not to those festivals.”
You can see the teaser trailer for Unprotected at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/unprotected–3#/
Giffune and her crew would like to thank everyone who helped and accommodated her over the course of this project: Her parents Jen and Joe Giffune, the Sienko family, the Ogonis family, the McMahons, the O’Neil’s, Bob McKean and the Stanley Park staff, Moon Mahmood and the Country Mart Staff, Mechanical Drive Components, Amber Danahey, Community Outreach Coordinator, Peter J. Miller , Westfield Community Development, Two Rivers Burrito Co, Emma’s Everyday Gourmet, Soup’s On, Richard’s Grinders, and Bueno y Sano.
