Arts & Entertainment

Arts & Entertainment

Staff photo by Faye Chapman From left, Wendy Milette, Geeta Malik and Jeanne Meyers, review submissions to the My Hero Project short filmfestival, held on Thursday, May 29.

Town Setting a standard to live by despite impossible odds, sharing therapeutic laughter and yoga, helping the homeless rebuild their lives and protecting endangered ocean waters are among the heroic causes depicted by local filmmakers.

On Thursday, My Hero Project showed a handful of short films at its first Laguna Hero Festival, at Seven-degrees, a mini filmfest spinoff of the 14 year old website.

Shaun MacGillivray was honored for his award-winning short film"Joey," about local teen Joey Masella, who died on Sept. 18, 2006.

Surfer and water quality advocate James Pribram was also honored for his short film"Eco-Warriors: Guardians of Surf."

Members of the Surfrider Foundation, Friendship Shelter, Laughter Yoga and school district's Community Learning Center were also acknowledged through film.

"It goes beyond filmmaking to a real story about real people, real life. People are affected by the stories," said Laguna Beach resident Jeanne Meyers, who in 1994 co-founded My Hero Project with Karen Pritzker and Rita Stern.

The threesome share a common background in the television and filmindustry. They started the website that celebrates every day heroes initially as a failed pitch for a television show. Producers told them it lacked commercial potential.

Today, the site draws an audience in 160 countries and 250,000 people a week, who access over two million web pages a month, Meyers said.

On the website, people of all ages and across the world share anecdotes and inspiration with messages about real heroes. MY HERO Project has collected a huge archive of stories and short films of heroes from all walks of life and four years ago held its first filmfestival.

The site also includes suggested lesson plans and curriculum in all grade levels for instructors. Traffic has doubled in the site's "teacher's room" to 6,000 hits a month. The search engine Google is impressed enough to strike up a partnership, offering to make it easier to link onto The My Hero Project.

As parents, the founders wanted to inspire a positive focus on people whose actions are for good, countering mainstream media's negativity.

"We felt if we built it, it would work but didn't know what we know now, or the Internet's capability for people from different parts of the world connecting," Meyers said.

While the site attracts filmand story contributions worldwide Meyers narrowed yesterday's focus to pay tribute to local filmmakers, home grown contributors.

Meyers' co-producer in the filmfestival is another local parent Wendy Milette, a graduate of USC's filmschool. With her experience, the My Hero site started developing educational materials for teachers and organizing its first filmfestivals.

Milette heads The MY HERO International Short Film Festival, which makes annual awards at the USC Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Art. Films are produced for online viewing and are under 10 minutes.

My Hero is also receiving state support for continuing to teach media education in places such as the Netherlands, Senegal, Egypt and Jordan.

Milette most recently traveled to Jordan where she finds the global part of filmmaking gratifying.

Another art facilitator from UCLA, Greeta Williams, fosters the site's writing program and poet heroes.

Contributions come from filmmakers of every age level, from novice to professional filmmakers, and in every genre, from documentary to narrative to musical to experimental and animated.

MacGillivray, whose father

produces wide-screen IMAX films, submitted "Joey" to My

Hero this year, where it won

first place in the best college

filmcategory. "I'm happy it raises awareness

about the wonderful life he led," said MacGillivray, who

captured the daily life of an

unusual 11-year-old boy who

lived each day to the fullest despite a rare skin disorder that

made movement difficult.MacGillivray practically lived

with Joey and his parents,

Laurie and Claudio, for 18 months while developing the

46-minute filmand a fiveminute

short that became a

senior thesis.

"The truth is that it changed me forever and made me realize that every day counts," MacGillivray said.

Submissions to the My Hero short filmfestival have grown consistently. "The movies are online all the time. They receive millions of hits a month. That's a lot of traffic,"Milette said, in addition to serving as a readily available teaching device on filmand culture.

"We're living at an exciting time when young people have the tools at their fingertips to tell stories; it such a positive use of these tools," Milette said.