On a cold Saturday afternoon in November, the basement of Fitch House was transformed into a vibrant party. But instead of creating the boisterous chatter that typically emanates from the building’s late-night student gatherings, attendees were merely mouthing words and making soundless gestures. They weren’t partygoers in the typical sense — the basement was filled with extras for this semester’s Purple Valley Productions (PVP) film project, Post Move.
The seeds for PVP were planted last year when five of the seven future club board members took the Winter Study course “A Filmmaker’s Workshop,” taught by actress Jessica Hecht. “Some of us started saying, ‘A film club is really something the College could and should have, [and] we have the group for it right here,” PVP President JohnCarl McGrady ’25 told the Record.
“There was a huge interest in the club in the Winter Study class, and so we knew that it could exist, but it just needed a foundation,” added Ben Davis ’27, the club’s technical director.
After the course concluded, McGrady, Davis, and PVP Vice President Jack Allen Greenfield ’27 formalized the group as a Registered Student Organization — which Davis described as the primary space for students to pursue filmmaking, given the College’s lack of a formal film department.
During its first semester, PVP was much smaller than it is now. The roughly 30-person group was composed of five students from Hecht’s Winter Study course and their friends, according to PVP Social Coordinator Ava Solis ’26. The group filmed and produced All That Remains, a 14-minute psychodrama film that follows the story of Thomas (Evan Zeltsar ’27) as he grapples with the fallout of a horrible accident: The charismatic leader of his friend group is shot after they steal a car.
Written by McGrady and directed by PVP Cultural Supervisor Emma Hennessy ’26, the film finished post-production this summer and premiered on Sept. 29 in Paresky Auditorium. Since then, PVP has grown to include over 100 crew and cast members as the result of robust advertisement this fall through the Purple Key Fair and its Instagram account. This growth allowed the club to take on a more ambitious project for its sophomore film, Solis said.
After the premiere of All That Remains, the PVP board selected the script for Post Move, written by Elizabeth Cheng ’27 and directed by Jackie Zhang ’27. It’s a coming-of-age story that follows two young women — Elsie, played by Sophia Rothman ’25, and Chiara, played by Kat Cloonan ’25 — who grew up playing basketball together but drift apart as they start college.
Editor’s note: Kat Cloonan, who is an executive editor for the Record, was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
“Post Move is based on scraps of journal entries, sketches, and other ideas that I jotted down this past summer,” Cheng wrote in an email to the Record. “I watched Dìdi and thought, ‘Hm, now I really want to make my version of a coming-of-age story.’”
Work for Post Move, according to Davis, has mirrored that of a professional production company: The process includes a pre-production phase, when the film’s producers find locations for shooting, work on production design, and cast the film; a production phase, when rehearsals and filming take place; and a post-production phase, when the film is edited and set to a student-composed score.
“Every step of the professional film pipeline is represented in some aspect here,” Davis said. “We really wanted a place that could emulate it and actually provide practical, hands-on experience for people.”
But replicating a professional film pipeline has been no cakewalk for the newly established club. “It’s a huge technical challenge because there is no film department at Williams,” McGrady said. “There’s no institutional backing for this — it’s just a bunch of college kids with a vision.”
To rent equipment from the studio art department, for instance, a student must be taking a studio art course — which means the film’s production hinges on a board member’s course enrollment to have access to cameras, microphones, and lights. Davis said that PVP is trying to develop a formalized relationship with the department in the hopes that they will not have to rely on such a loophole in the future.
And purchasing film equipment themselves is out of the question: According to McGrady, PVP spent its limited funding from Facilitators for Allocating Student Taxes on costumes and props, leaving little leftover for expensive technology.
Many PVP members have minimal film experience — but McGrady said that the club is more concerned with developing its members’ talents through hands-on experiences. “The idea is you should be able to come to college, never [having] been on a film set before, go to your first PVP shoot, and by the time you graduate, you should be able to be a cinematographer on a [professional] film,” he said.“We do want to be sort of professional career prep for people who can’t get that at Williams otherwise.”
