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Arts & Entertainment

Music Erupts in Local Filmmaker's Life

EBHS graduate and Rutgers filmmaker Zack Morrison takes a stab at a musical. The piece took second at the Campus Music Fest.

Last year, Rutgers University student and aspiring filmmaker was overwhelmed and honored to learn his short film Live had been accepted to the final round of Campus Moviefest (CMF), a film festival showcasing the cinematic endeavors of college filmmakers across the country.

What he took away from that festival was the overwhelming desire to make an even better short film.

“Last year Live didn't perform too well,” said Morrison, an East Brunswick High School graduate now entering his junior year at Rutgers. “It made it out to the CMF Finale in Hollywood being one of the top films from Rutgers, so that was good enough for me, but it was my first year doing the competition and one of my first short films in college and there were definitely things to improve.

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“I was blown away at the level of quality of the other films were.  The biggest thing I learned was how much preparation was necessary.”

Armed with his more thorough knowledge of the importance of preproduction, Morrison decided to set his own bar for 2012 CMF as high as possible.

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He decided to make a musical.

The end result, Don’t Make Me Sing, is a five minute musical comedy that tells the story of a man whose life spontaneously erupts into show-stopping musical numbers in everyday situations. And not only did the film make it back to the CMF Hollywood finale, it earned a nomination for festival’s Best Soundtrack award as well as it being a crowd favorite and quickly earned buzz as an audience favorite.

Not too shabby for a writer who had never even attempted the genre before.

Don't Make Me Sing was my first musical,” Morrison said. “At first I thought it was insane.  The rules of the competition only allow seven days for shooting and editing, so the pressure of making production feasible was rough.”

Morrison said it helped having a trusted producer and fellow musician at his side.

“My producer, Chris Pasi, and I wrote Live in class the week before the competition began, and while it worked for what we were trying to do, all the top films in the country that year were planned months in advance,” Morrison said. “By the time we finished the story for Don't Make Me Sing, it was December and we had three whole months to plan out pre-production.  That was huge for us.”

Of course, one essential element of preproduction for any musical is actually writing the music. Morrison and Pasi collaborated on this element of the film thoroughly. “Chris and I both come from different musical backgrounds,” said Morrison, who played the tenor sax in both the EB Wind Ensemble and the Jazz Band all through high school. “I am very influenced by New Jersey music...  Chris on the other hand has a musical theater background.  He acts in the theater groups on campus in a wide variety of shows.  The song he wrote was heavily influenced by rock operas like Rocky Horror.  He also is a member of the Rutgers University Glee Club, so he brought a lot from that as well.

“The combination of our two sounds really complimented each other well I think.”

Once the tunes were penned, the next problem was finding the voices to sing them.

“Casting was difficult at first,” Morrison said. “A big problem I faced was that school was still in session and a lot of students still had midterms.  Not many people were as crazy as I was and took the week off from class and work.”

There was, however, at least one role the filmmakers didn’t have a very hard time filling. “The main character was simple,” Morrison said. “Our friend Edwin 'Inchez Campos played the main character, Edwin. We knew from day one that we wanted Edwin to play the lead, and wrote the character to be just like him.  He has such a natural comedic presence.  I gave him only one direction: ‘Inchez, be yourself.’"

And this year, the fruits of Morrison’s and Pasi’s labors will be visible to a lot more people than Campus Moviefest attendees.

“Campus Moviefest partners up with Virgin America to show their top student films across the country on Virgin America's RED on-demand video system in-flight,” Morrison said. “Every month they choose a couple shorts and submit them to Virgin.”

In May, Don't Make Me Sing made the cut of CMF nominees, eventually coming in second to a film made by students from Ohio State. As the top two films end up Virgin America in-flight entertainment options, thousands of passengers flying over the Atlantic will soon find themselves entertained by Morrison’s film.

Don't Make Me Sing can be viewed at the Campus Moviefest website, www.campusmoviefest.com.

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