Zepherine: I really am from another planet.
Joshua: I don’t care if you’re from New Jersey. I’ll help you anyway.
— from script of Shuyao Zhang’s sci-fi short, Flutter
For first-time filmmaker Shuyao Zhang, the moment of truth for her sci-fi romance Flutter dawned before sunrise on the first Wednesday in August, at the Dirt Cowboy Cafe in downtown Hanover.
“We had to start shooting by 5 and finish by 7, so I was up at 4 in the morning,” the Dartmouth College graduate student from Hangzhou, China, recalled this week. “I thought someone would be late. But they were all on set, on time.”
“They” ranged from New York-based actors Larosey Burrill and Eric Mead — playing the 626-year-old alien in fetching human form and the Earthling who falls for her — and extra Sabra Field, the renowned illustrator from Barnard, to chief cinematographer and advisor Bill Phillips and a crew that included a number of students from his Dartmouth film class.
Throughout a two-day shoot around town and campus, they all made it to the sets on time, on behalf of a rookie director who was bringing to life the script she’d revised 11 times as an independent-study project toward her degree in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program.
“You can’t imagine,” Zhang said, “how grateful I am to see all these people willing to work on it.”
Phillips started recruiting those people not long after Zhang — who as part of her MALS studies took an experimental course that Phillips co-taught with former Dartmouth animation professor David Ehrlich — decided to write the screenplay.
“I’ve had other MALS students do film production, but usually it’s a documentary and often in a distant location,” Phillips, a Dartmouth graduate and veteran screenwriter, said on Wednesday. “This story just happened to come along at a time when I was free to shoot, liked the script and believed in the project. Then it became a matter of assembling the right crew in the area.”
The crew included production manager Amanda Montenegro of Norwich — who earlier this summer helped Hanover High School graduate-turned-actor Thea Brooks put together a crew for the shoot in and around Norwich of Brooks’ eco-oriented short Green — and assistant cameraman Daniel Osofsky, a 2016 Hanover grad who also worked on Green.
“The filmmaking community around here has grown a lot since 1973, when I used to complain that if you wanted to talk about film with someone, you’d have to make a long-distance phone call,” Phillips said. “Then I moved to L.A., where if you didn’t want to talk about film, you’d have to make a long-distance phone call.”
While growing up in China, Zhang could scarcely imagine pursuing a life in the creative arts, let alone belonging to a filmmaking community.
“I used to be really great at physics and mathematics while I was in high school,” Zhang said. “That’s why I’m stuck on sci-fi. I used to be such a nerd.”
This nerd also enjoyed conjuring worlds through words, thanks in part to a documentary she saw in her teens about pop-country star Taylor Swift.
“She was just so fearless, tried her best to do the things that she wanted to do. That really inspires me.”
In the long run, that inspiration overcame cultural pressures.
“My teachers who wanted me to go into math said, ‘Don’t waste your talent,’ ” Zhang added. “But I knew that my talent was in writing. I just didn’t have the courage (at the time) to break that wall.”
Then, after her first year of college, Zhang started taking literature courses and left math to pursue studies in media and advertising. Even before completing her undergraduate work in 2015, she found herself shooting commercials, writing a blog … and dreaming of pursuing a graduate degree at Dartmouth.
“I had read a book about a Chinese girl who came to Dartmouth and then went to Wall Street,” Zhang said. “I never thought that could happen.”
Not long after the Dartmouth part happened, Zhang found a mentor, then more inspiration.
“I could tell immediately that Shuyao is extremely bright,” Phillips said. “Though her English was a challenge at first, her ideas are plentiful and insightful.”
Eventually, the idea came along, on paper at first, to place an alien on Earth, specifically in Hanover. In human form, while trying to make a part in Dartmouth’s 3D printing lab to repair its transporter and return home, it meets the teaching assistant from its computer science class.
And interplanetary sparks fly.
“This theme wasn’t as evident in the first few drafts as it came to be in later versions,” Phillips said. “That’s pretty normal evolution for any script.”
The more she re-wrote, the more Zhang decided that a romance should bloom amid the cosmic issues.
“It started dealing more with space and time, but it’s hard to produce something like that, especially with limited resources,” Zhang said. “Then it came to me that love is the universal truth: ‘Why don’t we try to do something with that?’ I just wanted to make a delicate love story.”
With the writing and the shooting over, Zhang now is editing the footage to fit the 10-minute length, and mixing in sound and music. She hopes to achieve the final cut by the end of this month, and to have the physical product in hand come October.
How widely the film travels beyond Zhang’s MALS portfolio, and how deeply she pursues her interest in movies, remains to be seen.
“Being a filmmaker, being a director is so much fun,” Zhang said. “For now, I think I will just keep writing. Being a writer, it’s so much fun to create this little world, to allow the audience to wander around in it; escape their reality.”
The Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival offers the next chance to see South Woodstock director Jim Sadwith’s Coming Through the Rye on a big screen in Vermont. A screening during the recent Bookstock literary festival in Woodstock quickly sold out. Next Friday night at 7:15 at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater, Sadwith will present, then answer questions about, his dramatization of his encounter as a teen in 1969 with J.D. Salinger at the reclusive author’s home in Cornish. The film features Academy Award winner Chris Cooper as Salinger and, as the young protagonist, Alex Wolff, who plays bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Mark Wahlberg’s dramatization of the Boston Marathon terror attack of 2013.
At 1:30 p.m. on Aug. 27 at Middlebury’s Marquis Screening Room on Main Street, the festival also will screen Zephyr, a film by South Ryegate, Vt., resident and Blue Mountain Union High School graduate Liam O’Connor-Genereaux. According to its Facebook page, the movie explores “the true story of a gang of thieves who had to become a pop band to escape from the mob.”
Also in the mix is Peter and the Farm, a documentary about Peter Dunning’s effort to keep his Mile High Farm in Springfield, Vt., going amid a series of personal crises. The screening is scheduled for Aug. 27 at 7:15 p.m. in Middlebury College’s Dana Auditorium.
Other highlights include novelist Russell Banks talking with Middlebury professor and screenwriter Jay Parini on the subject of “Book to Film.” The discussion is scheduled for 4 next Friday afternoon, at Edgewater Gallery on Mill Street. Two of Banks’ books, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, were adapted into acclaimed movies.
For more information about the second annual festival, which runs Thursday through the following Sunday, visit middfilmfest.org.
Court Street Arts continues its run of free movies at Alumni Hall in Haverhill tonight at 6:30 with a screening of Top Gun, the 1986 Tony Scott film about Navy fighter pilots that featured a romance between a flier played by Tom Cruise and a flight instructor portrayed by Kelly McGillis, and that jump-started the careers of Val Kilmer and Tim Robbins.
∎ The Aging with Grace film series in Woodstock resumes next Friday afternoon at 3 with a screening of the 1999 documentary Grow Old Along with Me: The Poetry of Aging at the Norman Williams Public Library. Co-directed by Woodstock resident Anne Macksoud, the TV movie features actors such as Julie Harris and James Earl Jones reading poetry that explores the ups and downs of growing old. Admission is free.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.