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Date: 9/21/2022
EAST LONGMEADOW – A first-time filmmaker will have the premiere of his movie, “Get Back Up,” at the East Longmeadow High School (ELHS) auditorium on Sept. 24 at 7 p.m. While not a usual venue for a premiere, the location is fitting as the movie was born out of a recent ELHS graduate’s school project.
Zac Commisso, who graduated in June, produced and directed “Get Back Up,” a 37-minute film about the interactions between boxers.
Commisso said he has always been interested in writing and has “played around” with posting videos on YouTube.com since the first year of high school. Still, he had never seriously considered making a movie.
After enjoying a TV Production class with teacher and East Longmeadow Cable Access Television Director Donald Maki during Commisso’s junior year of high school, he decided to complete an independent study on filmmaking with the instructor in his senior year. “There were no rules or objectives,” Commisso said. Instead, the class focused on creating a piece of media from start to finish. The project created in that class became “Get Back Up.”
There were four other students working on the project with Commisso – fellow seniors Benjamin Weldon and Collin Dandy and Dominic Riggio and sophomore Franco Guimares. “It was a really fun group. Everyone got along and we all wanted the same thing and that’s rare,” Commisso said.
Maki said, “[Commisso] respects the work it takes, and the collaboration. This was very much the work of all five members of the group, and if it was Zac’s vision that that was realized, it was their commitment and respect for each other that made it possible.”
Commisso said everyone pitched in both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Guimares was the team’s “concept designer,” Commisso said.
“[Guimares] would say, ‘Why don’t we make this happen,’ and we’d do it. We had no reason to say no,” Commisso said, adding that it was Guimares’s idea to make a boxing movie after seeing the movie “Creed II.”
“I watch a lot of movies and watch what [directors] do and how they do it,” Commisso said, but added, “Everything technical I learned in [Maki’s] class.” The team worked with what Commisso described as a “borderline professional camera,” as well as green screens and visual effects.
“For me, it was of course incredibly rewarding,” Maki told Reminder Publishing. “We all learned a lot more than movie making. It’s a great discovery to find yourself doing something you never really imagined taking so seriously – which is not to say it wasn’t incredibly funny sometimes – and realizing at some point in the process that you actually have a pretty good idea about how you can do it well. We all make those discoveries, but this was an exceptional experience for that to happen.”
For Commisso, filmmaking “makes sense to me. I think in pictures, so putting a camera in front of someone’s face and watching them through that makes sense.”
Maki said Commisso took to filmmaking instinctively. “He has a natural understanding of how films work and how they’re constructed. His ability to create characters and narrative through dialog is very sophisticated for a high school student. His eye is attentive and intelligent.”
“Every part of [filmmaking] is fun except the audio. I hate audio,” Commisso said, but added, “I find myself screenwriting more. It’s the storytelling element of it that I’m really into.”
Maki said Commisso’s love of storytelling showed. “I think Zac is exceptionally gifted as a storyteller and filmmaker. He has a very mature insight into people, an empathy mediated by a kind of honesty about what people look like when they act most like themselves.”
Commisso is planning to continue working with filmmaking. “I’m lucky enough to have people around me who have great ideas and put up with me shooting the same thing 16 times,” he said. While Commisso does not have immediate plans to move to Hollywood to become a filmmaker, he said, “I’m definitely not giving up on it. I don’t care if I’m getting paid.” He thought for a moment and said with a laugh. “I mean, I’d like to get paid.”