The Sacramento Film and Music Festival had an interesting outcome this year. Two Rocklin High freshman, Nolan Ekberg and Ryan Miller, and Del Oro freshman Johnny Decastino won the best Fourth Wall Break (when a fictional character acknowledges they exist outside of reality) and Best Lead Actor awards for their short film, Making Of.

Making Of is an eight minute mockumentary about a student director who is working on creating his first film. The lead character, played by Ryan Miller, becomes increasingly frustrated with his father, who doesn’t believe his son will find much of a career in film making. By the end, he is finished with his film, and while it didn’t come out as he expected, he still felt satisfied moving forward in his budding career.

They were given ten days to create the film. Only one of these was spent writing the script. It was based on life experiences Ekberg and Decastino had previously had, although Nolan notes his parents have been very supportive of his journey as a filmmaker.

“It’s a mixture of our two life stories. Of course my family is extremely supportive of my film making, so it’s kind of a twisted version of that,” Nolan explains.

He goes on to state that while the film is inaccurate in portraying his family, his friends haven’t always been as helpful, but for the most part, everybody in his life has been very accepting of his passion.

Nolan and Ryan and are best known for their Youtube channel Shizard Studios, where another notable film titled Two Unlikely can be found. Since they did not want to release two short films at once, they instead uploaded it to a different channel.

“Right now, it is on my Youtube channel for the company I am trying to start, Alium Entertainment…It’s gotten a great response so far,” Nolan adds.

Part of winning the contest meant having their film play in a theater in Downtown Sacramento, along with the other winning films. One of Nolan’s other films, Two Unlikely, which took 1,500 dollars and a year to shoot, will be playing in a theater in Hollywood for the Culver City Film Festival, which will take place in December, 2018.

In the meantime, they plan on building up their portfolio and filming as much as possible. Nolan is busy writing scripts and working creating comedy sketches as he used to do on his channel, sometime soon. He also plans on going to Mexico in a few months for a freelance job.

Impressive as their feats are, the two young directors still want to top their previous projects and are even working on a feature film, which they want to finish by high school. Without a doubt, they have achieved more in ten days than most RHS students do in a year.