SMU film students enjoyed a summer full of meaningful internships and projects in Dallas without having to ship out to Los Angeles. The Daily Campus caught up with seniors Daniel Pappas and Jackson McMartin about their summers of student film.
To kick off the summer, many SMU students worked on a feature film called “Legacy.”

Alumni Rachel Wilson and Amanda Presmyck joined forces with current students Daniel Pappas, Geenah Krisht, Jackson McMartin and others to wrap the full-length feature in thirteen 18-hour days.

“It was some of the longest hours I’ve ever worked,” said senior Daniel Pappas.
“I was worried I would come into it and at the end not want to do film anymore because it would show me what the real world was like, but at the end I really enjoyed it so that was encouraging,” said Jackson McMartin on the long hours.
After finishing up the shoot for “Legacy,” which will be released in May of next year, Pappas and McMartin both interned at Dreamfly Productions, a company near SMU’s campus that is producing the new TV show “The Fame” this fall.

They even got to work on a promotional short that featured Cowboys player Tony Banks and the famous Cowboys fanatic Mrs. Price.

“She’s been to every game for the past 20 years,” said McMartin. “She was the most enthusiastic person I’ve ever met.”

Dallas has large commercial, corporate and reality film industries. Part of what the SMU interns worked on at Dreamfly this summer involved research for unreleased reality TV-show ideas.

“I can’t really give you a real example because the shows haven’t come out yet,” McMartin explained. “But if we were looking into Duck Dynasty before it was made, we would start researching the family, seeing the dynamic, seeing if there’s a story that can be made from it.”

All of the work these students did this summer helps promote the film industry in Dallas, while also giving students a taste of the real world without them having to outsource to L.A.

Pappas said he was pleased to find that the film industry in Dallas was not as “cutthroat” as its reputation implies.

“People talk about the film industry as really competitive, but people actually do want you to succeed…the more you work onset, the more you see that they really do want to hear your ideas,” he said.