Huntington News

Issue date: 9/13/07 Section: News

Media Credit: News Staff Photo/Zach Virgilio

According to the rules of Campus MovieFest (CMF), a nationwide student film competition, participating student groups have one week to create their movies. Under normal circumstances, this can be difficult. For Bryan DeBlasio and Mike Quill, who were living on different continents at the time, the circumstances were a bit more complicated.

DeBlasio and Quill have each won CMF's Northeastern competition individually in the previous years, and this year they decided to combine their talents.

DeBlasio was living in Boston and Quill was studying abroad in Brisbane, Australia, locations they used to their advantage when filming their movie "Departure."

By the end of the CMF, the five-minute film beat about 2,000 others to place second runner-up in the nationwide competition.

"I knew I wanted to work with Mike," said DeBlasio, who graduated last December with a degree in communication and cinema studies. "So that was the challenge - to make a movie here in Boston and in Australia, [and] to connect the two. So the story kind of developed around that."

In "Departure," a young American man and a French girl fall in love in Australia. The man takes a flight to Boston and the plane crashes into the John Hancock Tower. The man doesn't realize he has died until he later tries to touch the girl and his hand goes through her body. Unable to go on without him, she commits suicide and the two reunite after death.

The woman who played the French girl, who DeBlasio and Quill know only as Marie, had never acted before. Quill found her in Brisbane, working at a fruit market stand.

"We just thought she had the right look," said Quill, a junior communication and cinema studies double-major. "She had kind of a sad look in her eyes. She was perfect."

The two actors in "Departure" never met. Quill's brother, Doug, played the young man and DeBlasio shot all his scenes in Boston. When the two actors were supposed to be in the same shot, Quill put the actress in front of a green screen in the studio in Australia. Next, he sent his footage to DeBlasio via iChat.

"I just basically camped out at the computer lab at my school and I sat there all night long just sending him file after file," Quill said. "And a lot of times, the transfer would fail, or I'd get logged off the computer and have to start all over again. So I was just sitting there sending Bryan files all day for like, three or four days straight."

Continued...

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