Could Jarrett Conaway be Hollywood's next big thing? by sierra bellows
A clip from Jarrett Conaway's film, "Anthem":
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Conaway's introduction video for "On the Lot":
Jarrett Conaway (Col ’04) knows the movies from every angle; his mother took him to summer blockbusters based on his favorite comic books when he was a child and he swept popcorn off the floors of his local theater during his teen years. As a U.Va. undergrad he got behind the camera and earned a place in the prestigious directing graduate program at the University of Southern California (USC), the nation’s premier film school. Most recently, Conaway found himself in front of the camera as a contestant in the Fox reality show "On the Lot," in which up-and-coming filmmakers compete to win a $1 million development deal with Dreamworks.
Conaway was in the top 24 contestants chosen from among 12,000 aspiring directors from thirteen countries. Finalists were hand-picked by producers Mark Burnett and Steven Speilberg on the merits of their creative work. Conaway’s shot his winning film "Anthem" in a dry lake bed and a sound stage in LA. The visually lush, post-apocalyptic short chronicles the discovery of a time-capsule buried by the last surviving humans during a nuclear holocaust.
"I made ‘Anthem’ especially for the competition," says Conaway, "when I saw the announcement for ‘On the Lot’ in Variety, I thought, ‘That’s it, I’m gonna be on that show.’"
Conaway often accomplishes much with little more than his passion and the force of his will. During his final year at U.Va., while considering becoming a guinea-pig for medical research to fund a short film, he was awarded the University’s first Independent Student Arts grant. The result was "AM:PM," a gritty black and white 16 mm film about a young med student who joins the emergency services. A collaboration with the Charlottesville Albermarle Rescue Unit pumped up the verisimilitude of the 20-minute film and a motley crew drawn from the ranks of U.Va.’s Filmmaker’s Society—of which Conaway was president—helped make the ultra low-budget production a success. In Los Angeles, Conaway founded a production company called BFAM Studios with his business partner Garrett Thompson, took classes with some of Hollywood’s biggest directors, and got his foot in the door with a major studio during his auditions for "On the Lot."
Jarrett Conaway
Confidentiality agreements forced Conaway to keep his involvement in the show a secret from his classmates at USC during the filming of the early episodes. Only when the series went to air could he talk about his experiences, which included making a film in 24 hours and pitching a project while being filmed by nine different cameras—including one on a crane. Unfortunately, Conaway did not make it past the third challenge, but that won’t keep him out of the directing chair. His next endeavor will be his thesis short "Turbo," about cyber-athletes who compete in a fighting videogame tournament. He plans to develop "Turbo" into a feature length project that will capitalize on the motion capture animation technology that he learned in class with director Robert Zemeckis. "I’m interested in creating imaginary worlds, but ones that are grounded in character—real people with real problems," says Conaway.
On the subject of success, Conaway is philosophical: "It’s about the work that you do. Hearing great people talk doesn’t make you great, you have to carve your own path, you gotta hustle to make it."
