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After watching her grandfather live with Alzheimer’s during her childhood, Katherine Kittler was inspired by her grandmother’s commitment to her husband as his sole caretaker.

This experience led Kittler to recreate her grandparents’ story for her College of Visual and Performing Arts’ senior film thesis. Her film, “Where’s Gloria,” takes place over one night and follows the story of a woman named Gloria, who is forced to consider if keeping her husband at home is the right decision as his Alzheimer’s progresses.

Besides creating a movie, Kittler is one of many Syracuse University seniors studying film in VPA who filmed their final thesis projects during the pandemic. The seniors must work around regulations like smaller crew sizes, regular COVID-19 testing, social distancing and masks.

For Kittler’s film, only having a total of eight team members created a feeling of camaraderie as everyone worked really well together, she said. Her crew was made up of VPA students and coworkers from her job at Windwood Productions in Concord, New Hampshire.

“Seeing the process of how we have had to change, not just film students but in the industry, has been really interesting because it creates this whole new story line and way we have to think and go around bigger issues that arise,” Kittler said. “So with having only eight crew members on set we all had to be much more resourceful.”

To fund the film, Kittler raised $3,635 through a GoFundMe page and won VPA’s Bryan Buckley grant, which gave her an additional $1,000. Most of the money went into finding actors for the film through the casting website Backstage. The two actors she ended up casting for the roles were from outside New York and traveled to Syracuse to film in an Airbnb.

She is now in the editing stages of her film as the semester ends but recalled how supportive everyone was during the filming process. When filming the last shot during one of the final nights of production, the crew needed to create a complicated lighting transition. Even though they may have had a negative attitude due to how late it was, the crew was determined to get it done.

“They were on top of it and they said, ‘No, we want to get this done. We want to make sure we get this right,’ and I think that’s what was so cool, everyone was just working together to help the creation of this film,” Kittler said.

While Kittler filmed in Syracuse, fellow VPA senior Haley Diaz created her thesis film at home in Los Angeles. Her project is a documentary, “When Our Neighborhood Burned,” discusses the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which broke out after four Los Angeles police officers were found not guilty of beating Rodney King, and how her family witnessed the violence.

(L to R) Katherine Kittler, Haley Diaz and Jack Thomas are all seniors in VPA who have shot their senior theses during the pandemic, incorporating COVID-19 protocols while on the set. Christopher Scarglato | Asst. Culture Editor

Navigating COVID-19 was the biggest challenge for Diaz because she had come up with the concept mid-summer and was planning on doing interviews over Zoom because of the pandemic. But after deciding that Zoom wouldn’t be a compelling enough way to tell the narrative, she gathered a crew of four people and conducted interviews with her family in person.

“COVID was really interesting because I had to act as not only a director and as a lighting technician and all of the other jobs you can probably think of on set,” Diaz said. “But I had to also act as the COVID officer for the set to make sure that everyone, including the interviewees and crew were safe.”

To get the footage she needed, Diaz included COVID-19 protocols into her procedure by providing her crew with personal protective equipment, having them sign waiver forms and requiring testing.

She had professional experience working with the Rose Parade, which was shot in November and December, as a production assistant. The crew was over 100 people, and Diaz used her knowledge from her job to implement COVID-19 guidelines necessary to avoid transmission.

Two actors in Kittler’s movie traveled from outside of New York to Syracuse to film. Courtesy of Katherine Kittler

Another difficulty she faced was interviewing her family members without them feeling like she was exploiting their trauma for amusement. She wanted the process to feel personal and spent time comforting her family members and making them feel respected.

“This is the first time their voices have really come to light,” Diaz said. “I wanted to showcase that in a very respectful manner by letting them tell their stories and me just riding along with them in this conversation.”

Unlike Diaz’s documentary, SU senior Shelby Rodger’s film “Deep Mirrors” has no dialogue and instead leans on sound to tell the story of a girl who is returning to a place from her childhood and seeing how it changed.

Rodger was one of the only students to shoot during the fall semester and had to get special permission to do so because VPA students were encouraged to film in the spring. VPA professors changed the timeline that the senior thesis usually follows so that students are shooting and editing in the spring, as opposed to filming in the fall and having all spring to edit.

Due to COVID-19 protocols, the seniors hired fewer crew members. Kittler said having only eight crew members on the set forced them to be more resourceful. Courtesy of Katherine Kittler

SU senior Jack Thomas found that the most difficult part of creating a film during COVID-19 was the lack of motivation he had to come up with ideas. After procrastinating and going through many rounds of rewrites, he decided on a sci-fi thriller called “Simulacrum,” which follows a housewife who finds out that she’s a robot created by her husband.

Thomas had gone to the film program in Prague last spring, where students make a 35mm film with industry professionals, but was sent back to the U.S. before he had the chance to actually work on set.

When shooting his own film he didn’t mind the small crew size, as it helped to make everything more efficient. He doesn’t anticipate the film industry as a whole changing because of the pandemic, but he believes the content people watch will change as streaming services grow in popularity.

“If we can do it there’s no way Hollywood won’t be able to do it,” Thomas said. “Maybe they’ll have to spend a little more money or it will be a little bit more difficult but they’ll be able to do it.”

Published on April 25, 2021 at 10:04 pm

Contact Sydney: sabergan@syr.edu