The Nixa High School theater Troupe 3833 goes to the Thespian Conference every year to compete against other theater troupes from all of Missouri. This year, Troupe 3833, the theater troupe at the NHS, is bringing a short film to the competition. This film will be included in the showing among others on the first night of the conference for everyone to see and will later be voted on.
Sophomore Lucy Fleetwood has written and is currently directing the short film titled “5 Till” for the competition.
“It’s about the chaos of opening night, and the understudy for the lead girl is told she has to go on, and she has five minutes to mentally and physically prepare for that,” Fleetwood said. “It just kind of shows the intertwinement of different characters and different people in producing this musical.”
She started the NHS Film Club and plans to use “5 Till” in a resúme submission to a New York University film camp this summer, among other films she has created. She posts her short films to her YouTube page “@lucyjanefleetwood.”
“I want to be a director and go to New York and go to film school, and this is the start of my journey … I don’t really care if we win or not,” Fleetwood said. “It’s really just making it and having made something that’s our own and our creation. That’s what I love about it. I just love film as a whole, and I want to do this.”
Auditions were held in the black box theater as a cold read, where students had around five minutes to look over the script they were reading before auditioning.
“We were given a snippet of the script, and we were told to read for a certain character,” sophomore Melora Morgan said. “Then everyone would go read. If they thought you did good, they would keep you, and they’d have you read for the same character again or a different character, and you would read that script with another person. It’d be like a little duet audition. And I read my lines with, I think, three different people before they told me I could go home, and then we found out the cast list around three days later.”
Morgan plays Charlotte, one of the four main characters in the film. With rehearsals starting recently, the cast is working through the beginning steps of making the script come to life.
“Our first rehearsal is just a read-through [of the script], and then we did some character work because screen acting is a lot different than stage acting,” Fleetwood said. “Screen acting has to be very subtle and honest, and sometimes it’s harder to do than stage acting. But the character work, I think, helped a lot with understanding where we are and who we are. And we’re going to have one more rehearsal where we just kind of go through the motions a couple of times of what filming will look like.”
Troupe 3833 plans to continue bringing short films to the Thespian Conference next year. Students can get involved by reaching out to their Instagram page “3833 films” or Fleetwood’s Instagram page “lucy_fleetwood_”.
