by Dakota Antelman
Months after her sister, the only girl in the Hudson High School football program, quit the eighth-grade team, Rebecca Beaudoin’s documentary on the subject won a spot in Salem Film Fest Student 5 Minute Documentary Contest.
Beaudoin and a group of classmates traveled with media teacher Lynda Chilton to the Salem Film Festival on March 15, where her documentary was one of 13 five-minute documentaries screened. Beaudoin was the only student out of three Hudson students to have their documentaries accepted to the Salem Film Festival. She explains that she was astonished when she was told she had been chosen.
“I had talked to Ms. Chilton about submitting it, but I thought I had missed the deadline,” Beaudoin said. “I never knew that she submitted it without telling me. I woke up one Sunday morning to see a random email that I was a finalist in the film fest and I just got super excited.”
Beaudoin recently completed her documentary, “Game Changer,” for her TV News class. The five-minute documentary featured interviews with her own father Jeff Beaudoin, and her sister’s youth football coach Scott Guisti. The documentary profiled the struggles current eighth grader Amanda Beaudoin faced this past fall while also focusing on Amanda’s first season playing football.
“It was interesting for me,” Beaudoin explains. “I had never done a documentary, so trying to think of different documentary styles and how I wanted to film things and add soundtracks was interesting because I had never done it before.”
Beaudoin adds that she thinks the film became a bonding experience for her family. In fact, Rebecca states that perhaps her favorite moment from the documentary process was the moment she first showed a draft of the film to her family.
“The day before the documentary was due, I did a little practice showing in front of my family and my family friend who was over for dinner,” she explains. “It was the first time anybody had seen it. I thought it was just the rough cut, but it ended up becoming the final edition. Everybody’s expression and enjoyment of watching it was so great. It gave me more confidence when I turned it in.”
Rebecca, a senior, has long been involved in filmmaking at Hudson High School. She explains that she loved on-camera work before eventually transitioning to technical work behind the camera. Now, she says that she has “fallen in love with engineering.” She plans to major in engineering in college, but, encouraged by her success at the Salem Film Festival says she wants to keep making movies as a hobby.
Overall, for Rebecca, and her entire family, the acclaim given to her documentary only furthers the message she sought to convey in her piece.
“I wanted my documentary to be more aimed towards parents. If you prevent somebody from doing something that they feel really passionate about, that’s not a good thing. Meeting new people, trying new things is always what my family strives to do,” she says, echoing a sentiment expressed by her father in the documentary itself. “I thought that maybe this documentary would be able to get that across.”
The documentary is available at HudTV’s Vimeo page