A murder at a sleepover, a cabal of shadows kidnapping someone, and a place where memory seems to slip away. These are concepts of a few short films created for the Films On A Shoe String film festival at Fossil Ridge High School.

FRHS TV students created FOASS in 2005 to inspire students to make art out of their experiences. Awards are given for many different categories, like soundtracks, editing, acting and more. The films will be shown at 6:30 p.m., May 3,  in the PAC.

It took four months for freshmen Maddy Ferrin and Ana Rohde to co-write and co-direct “Secrets Kill” for FOASS after TV production teacher Brendan Gallagher told them they needed a project. 

The film is a murder mystery with a slice-of-life twist.

“It’s about a sleepover where one of them is killed,” Ferrin said. “The other three have to figure out who did it and why.”

Junior Charlie Tishkowski directed his FOASS project, “At Dawn” as a music video for the My Morning Jacket song of the same name. He’s been working on it since last summer. 

“It’s a song about overcoming your personal self doubts, the voices in your head telling you you’re not good enough, and I tried to capture that with the video,” he said.
Tishkowski’s film follows a man literally fighting his personal demons.

“There’s a man who doesn’t seem happy with his life,” Tishkowski said, “and these shadow creatures take him away and try to kill him, but he gets them first.”

Tishkowski found the filming process rewarding but challenging.

“We had to film really early in the morning,” Tishkowski said, “at a place 20 minutes away, and we had to be there before sunrise. The first day, we forgot our props and our pyrotechnics, so we didn’t get much done that day. I also had to drive to Denver to get our morphsuits because they didn’t arrive on time.”

Despite the challenge, Tishkowski is happy with the results and confident he’ll win an award.

“There are obviously tweaks I want to make, but we got what we got,” he said.  “There’s a lot of good competition this year, but I think I’ll win best soundtrack for sure.”