Everyone has dreams but very few people know what they need to do in order to go about accomplishing them. That's not an issue for Joshua MacNeal. The 19-year-old sophomore attends the College of DuPage and is already an award winning poet and photographer.
Currently, MacNeal is preparing to add another title to his resume; filmmaker. The accomplished young artist elaborated about his first feature length film and his fundraising campaign.
Windy City Times: I was told that you are working on a film called The Fourth Meeting. What exactly is the premise of the movie?
Joshua MacNeal: Well after a fatal car accident the main character—Diana, a career-focused woman— wants to deal with the circumstances and conditions that have arisen after her husband's death. In the midst of this whole tragedy, Diana's keeping a secret from everyone around her to prevent what could potentially demolish the whole structure of her already broken life. So, really, The Fourth Meeting deals with survival skills; that's the main theme and concept of the film. It's about what one confronts, ignores and even covers up to keep the life they were living.
WCT: What inspired this project?
Joshua MacNeal: Actually, it was random. I needed inspiration to write a short film and I was just asking people about concepts or ideas to write about, and one friend told me survival skills is rarely written about, literary-wise or in films. So I was, like, okay. So I created this short film based off of it which was the first two scenes of the movie; from there my co-author —Cy Weisman, who is also my sister—[and I] decided to just bust it out to feature-length and, so, that's what we did.
WCT:I know that you said that this is the one film that you're doing that isn't a class assignment, so was it just a spur-of-the-moment thing where you just said to yourself "I want to do something for me?"
Joshua MacNeal: Sort of. Basically, the whole idea of film school is that you go do undergrad and your senior year, you make a short film that's like 15 minutes, and then you submit it at the festival and everything like that. Then after that short film you submitted you get into grad school. Then you get into grad school and you make another short film which is like 15 minutes long and you submit it at the festival. Then after grad school, you've graduated and you're in debt and you have some money but you're trying to create a feature length film, you get a spot in a big festival so you can get a job. That's how all the famous directors did it. Make a feature-length and get it into one of the big festivals.
That whole concept seems odd to me. Why would you wait once you're out of school? You have no money so you're trying to take out credit cards and go in extreme amounts of debt to budget and create a feature-length film. So I have all the resources since I'm in school and my friends are much older than me and they knew professional video directors and past photographers and stuff. So I've always been around the creative process of the filmmaking world and I had a general idea of how it all works. So I was, like, "Why wait when I have 50 resources from the school and all the lighting and audio equipment I'll ever want?"
WCT: Well it sounds like you definitely had a plan and thought ahead. I checked out your personal Facebook page and the film's page as well, and I noticed that you also write poetry and you are a photographer. Has your experience in these other mediums helped to transfer over into filmmaking?
Joshua MacNeal: Definitely. Ever since I was 9, I wanted to be a filmmaker. That was my occupation call. In high school they never had any film courses so I was waiting until college but my sophomore year, I fell into photography and my photography teacher saw that I had great talent.
She mentored me into creating a body of the work in fine arts, like Flash Forward. So I've been producing a lot of work. I've shown my work in professional galleries, things like that. I've also been writing poetry since I was in seventh grade and I was mentored by Darrell Robin. He helped me with rhetoric, linguistics and literature in all my work. He helped me with my writing and my junior year I won two national awards for my poetry and prose. I got a National Achievement Award for writing and the Scholastic Art and Writing Achievement Award. I won both of those my junior year and senior year. All movies are just photography and writing. Due to my two backgrounds it's just using those two together. Film is the ideal medium for me since it incorporates everything I work with and that I love pretty much.
WCT: Have there been any setbacks or problems that you didn't expect or account for since the start of this whole process?
Joshua MacNeal: Pretty much I didn't expect the amount of paperwork. Since I'm producing and directing, there's a lot of paperwork, scheduling and getting things together. Holding auditions was a great deal of work; figuring out production schedules and rehearsals. The biggest thing for us is we are still attempting to cast the father figure for the film. We have nine out of the ten roles cast except for that one. That one we were still working on. Then we're just working on funding for the film. Our biggest up to now has just been getting the funding on Kickstarter.
WCT: What is your overall goal for the Kickstarter campaign?
Joshua MacNeal: Our overall goal is, at a minimum, a return budget which is $3,500—and that's just the bare minimum we need. That's just to cover the compensations for the actors and the crew, for the location security, the permits—the basic necessities to make a movie. We hope that we make more so we'll be able to pay everybody more because all the actors and crew are working for bare minimum just because they're dedicated and they love the project. They think we're going to turn out a great product so they're working for barely anything to make this happen; something that they're happy and proud of.
WCT: Regarding the campaign, what has the response been like so far?
Joshua MacNeal: It's been great, actually. Within the first five to seven days we made close to $2,000 and we're hoping to keep that momentum and have more people donate to the project and receive rewards back.
WCT: What would a potential investor have to do to make a donation to the project?
Joshua MacNeal: All they have to do is go to our Kickstarter campaign and click on "campus project" and on the page there are different amounts of money that you can donate. You can donate however much you want, but if you pass a certain marker point you get rewards back. You can get the soundtrack for the film, a copy of the movie, a copy of the signed script; if you donate $250 or more, you'll get credited at the beginning of the film as an associate producer or an executive producer at the finishing of the project.
WCT: When do you hope to release the film?
Joshua MacNeal: Well, the film should be completed by June. [The premiere is] going to be at the film festival and, if I'm correct, at this particular film festival the first screening has to be at the festival. You can't have a prior screening.
See www.kickstarter.com/projects/1168416373/the-4th-meeting-a-drama-with-comedic-elements .
