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Issue #66 – Student Successes
by L. Swift and Jeff McQ
Spend a few minutes talking with Film Connection graduate Mark Doster, and you’ll soon hear about his passion for film, particularly in the horror and suspense genres. Inspired by such directors as Brian DePalma, John Carpenter and Dario Argento, he also has some specific ideas about what makes for the best scary moments in film—and it isn’t those obvious moments that startle the audience.
“I always think about Hitchcock’s , ‘It’s not in the bang, but the anticipation of the bang,'” he says. “People don’t really get that anymore, and I want to, kind of try to bring that back. I don’t like jump scares. Instead of having a clown pop in front of my face, I would love to watch it creep down the hallway slowly towards me and I can’t move.”
For anyone who knows Mark, it’s no surprise that he is aggressively pursuing a career as a film director. “Movies were my friends,” he says, reflecting back on his childhood. “I watched them repeatedly and would always decipher what I liked, what I didn’t like, why I liked it. And I always had my favorite directors. I followed directors even when I was really young. And I thought that was normal, but apparently it was weird because nobody else knew directors’ names.”
That passion recently resulted in Mark winning the coveted Award of Merit from the Accolade Global Film Competition for his suspense/horror short film Rest Your Soul, a film he says was inspired by real-life events.
“I was walking dogs,” says Mark. “I had the address for a dog…I went in the house, and there was caution tape on the basement [door]. And I remembered my boss saying, ‘Do not go in the basement, whatever you do.’ So it just seemed to me like walking into the wrong house, something’s possibly hidden in the house that the owner doesn’t want you to see…So “Rest Your Soul” was a restless student that gets that dog job, walks into the wrong house, and he becomes trapped in there with a killer when he finds the victim in a room instead of the dog that he’s looking for.”
As it turns out, Mark has a unique perspective on the best ways to learn the filmmaking craft, as his passion led him to pursue a film education from a number of different angles. When he found the Film Connection, he was already enrolled as a student at Colorado Film School in Denver, CO, but found his education lacking in some ways. “I don’t really do well in a giant class setting,” he says. “I like one-on-one collaborations.”
For Mark, apprenticing on-the-job provided the real-world experience he wasn’t getting in traditional film school. “Film sets don’t really run like schools will tell you,” says Mark. “You have to go see it for yourself. And the production side of things—Film Connection elaborated on that a lot more, the business side, and how serious it is.”
Mark apprenticed under two mentors with the Film Connection: locally in Denver with filmmaker Johnny Fisher, with remote support on screenwriting from Richard Brandes in Los Angeles. “[Johnny] was pretty good at effects,” says Mark of his Denver mentor. “It was nice to have somebody to go see physically, with equipment, and actually have them talking to just you and not a whole classroom.”
With Brandes, his screenwriting mentor, Mark found a particular connection. “He would read my script, and we would talk about it every time,” Mark recalls. “Like every act I wrote. And then we would get nerdy and talk about old movies and how stupid movies are getting, and this and that.”
Now living in Orlando, Florida, on the heels of his success with Rest Your Soul, Mark is currently working on two original screenplays and is making preparations to turn at least one of them into a feature film—a daunting task, but one that Mark is determined to make happen. He continues to stay in contact with Brandes when he has questions, and he says his former mentor is encouraging him to press forward. “I’ve been telling him what’s going on and about the budget for this new feature, how crazy it is,” says Mark. He’s like, ‘Well, I’ve done it before…You can, too.'”
***You can check out Mark Doster’s film Rest Your Soul in its entirety in the “Apprentice Media” section below!
or call (800) 755-7597
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