By Luke Chaffee

Have you ever wanted to make a movie? I don’t mean something you made in high school with your friends and posted on Youtube only to get 30 views (22 of those being the same friend that helped you make it.) I mean an honest to god film, playing up on the silver screen

with hundreds of people watching in a crowded theater. It wasn’t mine until about a year ago when I started in the Communications and New Media program here at SMCC. That’s when I learned about the Maine Mayhem program. What is the Maine Mayhem program? It’s a year long marathon that exhausts even the best and the brightest.
In the fall I began a class called pre-production, a semester long process of getting everything organized in order to make a movie. From schedules, to hiring actors, to lighting diagrams, everything needs to be planned out or else you can end in total disaster, EVERYTHING. I have my doubts that there is any course harder at SMCC than pre-production. Every week was a new challenge this semester for me. One week I’m scouting locations around Portland to try and figure out where exactly I’m going to film, to the next week having to figure out how I can organize my schedule so that everyone I need to be on set can be there for all 6 days.

So here we are, the end of the semester… and I’m not sure I’m ready for this. As I write this, I have two more days where that class meets. On the final day, I have to get in front of a classroom full of people, a panel of judges and pitch my movie. Four months of work boils down to five minutes. You either make it or you don’t.