On Thursday afternoon, Kaitlyn Chaumell, 17, was kind of ambushed during school with some really good news.
She walked into a classroom with a couple vaguely familiar faces greeting her — John Armstrong and Emelie Flower of Constellation Stage & Screen.
“You're the winner of this year's Project Constellation,” Armstrong told a stunned Kaitlyn, before news media, other classmates and family.
When asked how she feels, she said, “I'm in shock, also, when we start filming?”
The contest was for Indiana high Schoolers, who submitted a 12-page script to Constellation Stage & Screen out of Bloomington. This is the opportunity for her short feature film script to be made by a professional crew and shopped to festivals.
“I heard about the opportunity at the beginning of January for my counselor,” she said, referring to Shannon Hughes, academic advisor. “And so I was like vigorously working on it the entire month.”
Armstrong said her script had that important “authenticity” which Kaitlyn said came from her life experience.
“... but I also kind of drew from just the wisdom that I've heard from my parents, things I've heard from my peers, and tried to kind of make the characters more realistic in their interactions.”
She said her script is about her past experiences which made her emotionally who she is today.
Attending were her parents and grandmother.
Armstrong said not only will her script be made professionally into a short film, Kaitlyn and classmates will get great experience as it’s made — something that has happened over the six years of the contest.
“By shadowing all the professionals on the set, young people learned, there's a lot of great jobs and different aspects to filmmaking that they can participate in, whether that's sound design, or cinematography, or lighting, costuming.”
Their first step is working with Kaitlyn on her script. They’ll also need to fundraise the $25,000 to produce the film.
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