Head Over Heals for Film

Senior Lance Karasti is a dream-chasing storyteller. “It's probably my all time favorite thing to do, even before I could talk I was telling stories,” Lance said, “My parents filmed me telling a story in gibberish to my neighbors when I was like one. I was talking for three hours, but no real words seemed to come out. What's awesome is that I still captivated them, because they sat there the whole time.”

When Lance was five-years-old he made his first film on a family vacation to Florida. His favorite movie at the time was Jurassic Park, and he watched it nearly every day. While in Florida, he and his family visited a dinosaur-themed amusement park, and his parents brought along a video camera. “I asked if I could film. So I started just, you know, pointing the camera at people as they did things,” Lance said. “Then I realized, ‘This place is just like Jurassic Park!’”

“I started forcing my brothers to act like the dinosaurs were chasing them, but they stopped after about a minute and refused to help me create my masterpiece,” Lance said. “That was the first time I realized I could use this camera to make movies.”

From that day on, Lance thrived on the magic of creating movies. He began creating films of his favorite movies— first Jurassic Park, then Batman, then Star Wars. After that he started taping footage of the games he and his friends played in the yard. He kept on this creative path all the way to eighth grade, making movies for school projects. “That’s when I started getting serious, and realizing how to use camera angles, when to cut, and how to communicate story through film,” Lance said.

Senior Joseph Sabroski met Lance at church in 2000, and they’ve been good friends since. Sabroski enjoys hanging out with him because he’s fun, individual, and always has something interesting to say. “Lance is unique because he has an unconventional mind,” Sabroski said. “He is very creative, and when it comes to moviemaking, he does what he wants, regardless of what people might think of his ideas.”

“My whole life I wanted to be a writer,” Lance said. “I was always writing stories, and I even had a fake library in my room of all my stuff and I'd make my parents check out stories. But once I realized I could be turning the things I wrote into movies, I knew I wanted to be a film maker.”

Filmmaking is deeply rooted in Lance’s heart; he doesn’t just like it, he “loves” it. Going just a day without doing something that involves movies, he feels a void. “Film making is the thing that 'completes' me, to quote Jerry McGuire,” Lance said.

Lance’s biggest passion is expression, which easily explains his amusement with storytelling and translates into a love of film. “I feel the need to express myself and to try and get others to express themselves,” he said. “It's one of the many reasons I make movies, it's another way for me to express certain things.”

Although it may seem a romanticized idea to become a movie director in the Hollywood Hills, Lance is driven by this, rather than discouraged. "Well I know it's going to be extremely difficult, but that's one of the things I love about it,” Lance said. “I've never wanted to settle on anything my whole life, so why would settle on what my life is going to be?”