Albany filmmaker?s short ?Giving Her Away? wins Paste Magazine award
By Heather Crabtree
The Entertainer
Friday, December 23, 2005, Section: Features, Page ET24 Dateline: Corvallis
TenPas, Jacob
For some, the love of filmmaking is cultivated young, when a child discovers the joy of pointing a camcorder and recording the world around him.
For Andrew Stanfield, though, that love was cultivated later in life.
He never had a video camera growing up, and the first time he really started working with film was when his wrestling coach, Brent Belveal, put a camera in his hands to film matches for South Albany High School in the early 1990s.
"It was my first introduction to the technical side," Stanfield said.
Even with his experience in high school, the 29-year-old filmmaker does not mark it as a defining moment on his path.
Still, when Stanfield finished his service in the Air Force at age 24 and found himself facing a number of life decisions, his mind returned to those days behind the camera.
"I?ve always had an interest," he said. "When I got out, I thought I?d just go for it. So, I moved to Los Angeles and started film school, which was a little crazy since I had just gotten married."
No matter when Stanfield caught the bug, success has shined on the Albany native since graduating from Azusa Pacific University with a degree in cinema and broadcast arts in June 2005.
Featured in the December-January issue of Paste Magazine is a DVD of short-films entered into the magazine?s Rockin? Reel Film Festival (pasterocknreel.com). Stanfield?s film, "Giving Her Away," is among the shorts featured, but the title also holds another claim. Stanfield won the Best Student Film award for it.
"I knew it was going to be on the DVD before I won, but didn?t know I won," he said. Stanfield got the good news when he arrived at the festival in Decatur, Ga.
The film also marks the first script he has written for production, and he chose a topic close to home for him and his wife, Danae, a former gymnast at Oregon State University. Although Stanfield does not have a family based in adoption, his wife?s does. Danae, her sister and her mother were adopted.
Adopted children often look for their birth parents, said the filmmaker. In his film, however, he turns the table and shows adoption from the mother?s standpoint, exploring how she feels in her search for the child she gave up.
According to Stanfield, the road to the festival was fortuitous. The script seemed to sell itself when he was seeking volunteers and trying to get production underway.
"I won a grant from APU for it," he said. "I wrote about 12 drafts of it, revising and changing and figuring out what works for the budget. I knew I had it in me but was surprised since this was my first film."
In addition, his fortunes continued when his leading actress, Christinna Chauncey, agreed to take on the role of the mother. She originally told him that she did not do student films anymore, but changed her mind after reading the script, he said.
While writing the script, Stanfield found a song by Over the Rhine that he listened to repetitively because he thought it fit. To his surprise, the band gave him permission to use it in the film for free because they enjoyed the script.
His work on "Giving Her Away" has opened the door for Stanfield to continue his interest in screenwriting. Starting this month, he is working for Act One Inc. (www.actoneprogram.com) as an assistant office manager and assistant to one of the screenwriters.
"It?s a great opportunity to be in a creative environment and being mentored as I work on my next project. It was encouraging (to get the job), and it came directly from the film," he said. "I?m obviously not directing a Hollywood feature yet, but I feel a lot is happening since I finished school."
Under deadline to finish "Giving Her Away" by the end of the school year, Stanfield ended up submitting the same version he turned in as his final project. With the cash prize he won, he and his crew are going to make it sharper and submit it to more festivals, including the Forest Film Festival in Oregon.
Paste Magazine can be found at any major bookstore, including Barnes and Noble, and Borders.