Lights, camera, action. A phrase universally known but a phrase universally misunderstood. For many, it signifies the creation of video entertainment, a three-step process and you’re done. But for the actual creators, it’s a phrase that carries far more meaning: countless hours of hard work reshooting the same scene a hundred times over, painful editing, rewriting the script three times a day and finally creating a finished product, ready to be presented to the world. For the directors, screenwriters, actors, and everyone else in the film industry; lights, camera, action is their lives.

  For Zack Godfrey, filmmaking called to him at a young age.

   “I’ve always really enjoyed movies, just as a whole, being able to go on an adventure and being able to escape reality, movies really inspire me a lot,” he said.

   On Jan. 12, Godfrey won Wenatchee High Schools first annual Wenatchee Film Showcase with his film “Provoked by Fury.”

  “I initially didn’t want to make a war film but my friend Reid is really into that type of stuff so he encouraged me to try it, we actually took a real event with the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and I kinda took the story and made it my own from there,” he said. “It felt really good [to win], that was actually the first film festival I’ve ever been in so it definitely gave me more confidence to keep doing what I’m doing.”

  The film centers around a U.S soldier separated from the rest of his battalion as he’s forced to fight against two Germans who are hot on his trail.

  “Pre-production and writing the screenplay took two months to complete. My crew and I then went to Birch Mountain to film,” he said.

  The film was shot over the course of three days with filming taking five to eight hours a day, it then went into post-production and editing, where Godfrey spent the next three months adding in effects, working on sound design and perfecting the film as a whole. With “Provoked by Fury” completed in November, Godfrey was quickly encouraged to submit his film for The Wenatchee Film Showcase.

  “A lot of my cast and film crew had seen the flyers and stuff around the school so they immediately told me about it and encouraged me to enter,” he said.

  With the success of “Provoked by Fury” Godfrey is excited about the potential for his next project.

  “The next film I’m doing is a short film called “Tagged Vigilance,” It’s a film about organized crime. It doesn’t really have a set time but it’s gonna be kinda in that gangster era with high stake robberies and stuff like that,” he said.

 Influenced by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, Godfrey looks to them for inspiration.

  “They mainly work around genres of crime and that’s really what I want to go into, I really enjoy those films,” he said, “I want to eventually end up being a screenwriter and director, so I’d write my features and then direct them, Hollywood is my goal.”

  Godfrey will be continuing his love for filmmaking as he plans on majoring in film studies, screenwriting or film production wherever he ends up attending.