Garrick Bateman is a very busy senior at Fossil Ridge High School. He is a longtime member of the film/television program, the Technical Theater program, and National Honor Society. The one thing that Bateman has done constantly throughout high school, and even before, is write. Garrick has written a lot of different pieces, from short films to screenplays to entire books. I have worked with him since our freshman year in TV 1, and his story since then has been one of perseverance and striving for improvement.

So far, his senior year has been packed but enjoyable. Switching from academics and AP classes to college applications and scholarships has been a big focus of Bateman’s year, but overall he called it, “pretty smooth sailing and balanced, but busy.” The extracurricular side of Bateman’s life is where you can really see what he is all about.

Television 3, his favorite part of senior year, has treated him very well. He has worked on a number of projects in a variety of roles, including writing and directing shorts like Jack, Sparrows 2, and producing things like Madwoman by Megan Bean. Jack, for him, was the big one. He worked on the short film all year, long before Television 3 started. Jack is the final big film Bateman will have made as a student at Fossil Ridge High School, and he wanted it to be unique to his style. In the past he has been fairly “out there” with his projects. 80s Pop, for example, a western he made his sophomore year, was what he described as a “catastrophic failure. Nowadays he sees it a positive learning experience that contributed to the main film of his junior year, Maelstrom. Maelstrom got into the All American High School Film Festival and was a very positive learning experience that Bateman took almost directly into making Jack.

Jack is very different from the two aforementioned films. 80s Pop and Maelstrom were both very high-concept pieces, with one being set in the wild west and the other in the dark future. Even his other films, Knock Up Boys and Limbo, were very abstract pieces. Jack, meanwhile, is very grounded in reality and it takes on a perspective much more close to home.

Bateman describes it as, “very much less in your face than Maelstrom… it’s more nuanced in the subtleties.” Jack being so different is what really demonstrates Bateman’s growth as a writer and as a filmmaker. He feels that his maturity has grown a lot and that this film shows it best. Set during New Year’s Eve, Jack is looking like an exciting deviation from Bateman’s traditional form. He is excited to show it off at this year’s Films On A Shoestring Film Festival and possibly others.

Bateman’s other primary focus this year has been Technical Theater. I was with him as a member of the sound crew for Fossil Ridge High School’s fall musical, Rent. In the second semester he moved up and got a position as an Assistant Stage Manager for the upcoming play, One Man, Two Guvnors. His responsibilities have included managing a couple crews for the show and working with them as needed.

Apart from the school, Bateman is really into rock climbing. He finds it to be a stress reliever, and, ironically, kind of relaxing. Of course, he is also very passionate about writing. He is currently working on a series of short stories among a number of projects that he hopes to wrap up and publish at some point. He writes pretty much all of the time, jumping from writing out an idea to going to his dad for revisions and advice to moving forward and improving with every piece. He plans to extend that part of himself in college, as he is attending Gonzaga University for English Literature. Even farther out from that, Bateman has hopes to open a multi-media publishing house one day that will focus on giving a stage for high school students to show their work.

Bateman has two key pieces of advice for students looking to possibly work in theater, TV, or any field that may seem daunting by its size. He states, “Don’t be afraid to start from the bottom, it takes work, but that experience can really help you. Take that idea for a project that you thought was dumb from the back of your head and make it. If it fails, that’s ok. It’s all a learning experience and sometimes you have to go for the scary things.