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The film-making industry may have began in Fort Lee, but a few hopeful motion picture makers seek to revive the once famed New Jersey enterprise in Asbury Park.

Under the leadership of veteran film editor and city resident Karen Heyson, about 15 people gathered at The Showroom Cinema last week to discuss ways to work together to make films. By the meeting’s end the group decided their first aim will be to create music videos for local musicians to enter into the inaugural Asbury Park Music in Film Festival.

Music videos are a fitting way to cut their teeth, since they are short and there is no need to record sound along with the picture since the song itself is the track, Heyson said.

The group has since moved to a digital forum where they are actively sharing clips of local bands’ songs and discussing their selections. This will build a Yellow Pages-esque list of human and equipment resources, Heyson said. Members will meet again this Tuesday face-to-face. Moving forward, Heyson will organize one large group meeting once a month or bimonthly to start other projects and get new people into the mix.

“It was great, I’m really happy with the mix [of people interested], their enthusiasm and general spirit,” Heyson said. “There were a lot of real artists there.”

Group members’ ages, backgrounds and skill sets are many and varied. They range from someone who built simulation technology to teach pilots to land on aircraft carriers to someone who taught media literacy in New York for a handful of years to the first runner-up of this year’s AP in 3 Film Challenge, said city resident and group participant Jeffrey Seeds. 

“I think that it was an amazing sort of reveal of what sort of talented people are attracted to Asbury Park,” Seeds said. “There is a film community here — and maybe I know that but seeing such people gathered together made me feel that we have the pot in the future to be a regional center of film making.”

Heyson’s general idea is to rotate production jobs as they work on other projects. Where one person may be an actor for one script, they can move on to be the director, script writer or camera person for another. There are no limits on anything, and the films can be shot anywhere, she said.

Recalling the time she lived in Manhattan’s East Village in the early 80s, when it was still affordable for artists, she said there was a creative spark that flew through the streets. People would just meet, talk to, inspire and motivate one another to be creative. This is what she seeks to build in Asbury Park, she said.

“There were all these people that wanted to do stuff,” she said. “They didn’t have jobs, every day was an adventure. It was just that spirit and energy to do creative work because you wanted to do it, that is a little bit of what I want to see happen here [in video and film].”

For now, she is focused on building the group.

“That is the main thing — to build the group,” she said. “It would be nice to work on a feature at one point, maybe work on a series, or have the group create their own YouTube channel.”

Heyson, a retired video editor, didn’t go to film school. She learned everything she knows about film on the job. Her credits include commercial work, editing corporate films, and the short-lived Comedy Central’s series TV Funhouse. Back then analog equipment was expensive and bulky, she said, but the dawn of digital and its fast growth has made the bulk of film-making aspects accessible and affordable.

It’s not her first foray into bringing residents together to shoot film. Heyson previously put Asbury Park students to work with PulseAP, a collection of online news videos about events and businesses in Asbury Park.

Anyone interested in joining the group can email Heyson at apfilmmaker@yahoo.com.

[Photo at top provided courtesy of Jeffrey Seeds.]

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