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Published on 10/20/1999 All articles from this issue

Filmmaker takes top award

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By Linda Taaffe / Town Crier Staff Writer

Student Profile

Name: Christina Frenzel

School: Freshman at Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto.

Achievement: The Los Altos Hills resident recently won first place in the junior high category of the 1999 Regional Children's Film Festival for California and was named a finalist in the national competition for her film "I Wish." Only 20 students nationwide were selected as finalists in this category. The participants, which included youth ages 9-18, wrote, directed and produced their own entries.

Frenzel described her film as a documentary/music video.

Frenzel said she based the six-minute film on issues that middle school students commonly face - popularity and grades.

"My picture of middle school is based on my own experiences," she said. "I wanted to show how middle school really is ... I hated (middle school). It's really unfair."

Frenzel, who was an eighth grader at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School while making the film last year, said she lugged her camera around campus for about a month filming her classmates in both candid and staged scenes. Her soccer coach donated an editing studio for Frenzel to use and a music teacher helped Frenzel compose an original song for the film's background.

In one portion of the film, Frenzel shows a student eating alone and then pans to students in the school's popular clique eating together.

Actors hold up signs between shots that say "I wish" to portray the feelings of those students struggling to be more popular.

The first-time filmmaker said she never expected to win the competition. "I was very surprised," she said.

Frenzel said although she had several movie ideas, she had never filmed anything until last year, when she enrolled in a video production class.

Frenzel's film was scheduled to be screened in Minneapolis this month.