Category: NEWS CHOICES

By Matt Wiley | NEW TAMPA

Film festivals. Red carpets, celebrities and champagne come to mind. Or, maybe that’s the Oscars. But, for one Freedom High graduate, the Tribeca Film Festival could be a stepping stone to the latter, as he premieres his short film, “The Exit Room,” during the New York City festival to help get his name out there and bring exposure to his work.

Todd Wiseman, Jr., 25, graduated in 2005 from Freedom, where he worked on the school’s morning news. Now, he works on the sixth floor of a building in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, the building that his production company, Hayden 5 Media, LLC, calls home.

On April 20, Wiseman was expected to premiere his ten-minute film, a look at the punishment of a captured journalist awaiting execution during a futuristic American revolution, to a theater of festival attendees.

“I had been to (the) Tribeca (festival) before as a guest, and it was a really exciting experience,” Wiseman explains. “(The festival) is really cool because it brings together international filmmakers and local filmmakers. Tribeca has a ‘narrative’ category, so we entered ‘The Exit Room,’ and it got selected, which is a huge honor.”

Wiseman says that the short, which stars Christopher Abbott (HBO’s “Girls” series), already had generated some prefestival “buzz” and that he already has received offers for distribution and representation, which are usually the goals when an independent filmmaler takes a film to a festival.
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