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/8-3-2011-TheNewsOrangeCounty-ChapelHillNC

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Movie Makers of Orange County meets the Gosselins BY ERIN WILTGEN e.wiltgen@newsoforange.com (919) 732-2171 MOVIE MAKERS CLAIM TO FAME ERIN WILTGEN / NEWS OF ORANGE Melissa Lozoff, owner of Movie Makers, stands in the costume shop at the studio. Lozoff recently shot with the Gosselin kids for the "Kate Plus 8" TV show;her segment will air Monday, Aug. 8. Imagine a world where lions, pirates and Martians all coincide, a logical - at least somewhat - storyline that weaves the lives of these three drastically different characters into one. Well, the Gosselin children from "Kate Plus 8" did, and Melissa Lozoff of Orange County's Movie Makers helped them transform their wildly imaginative tale into one cohesive film. The produeers of "Kate Plus 8" asked Lozo·ff to travel up to Pennsylvania in March for the project and walk the eight Gosselin kidsfraternal twins and a set of sextuplets-through her program of writing, acting, filming and eventually watching their own movie. The episode will air Monday, Aug. 8, at 9:30p.m. on TLC. "It was a lot of fun," Lozoff said. "It was stressful working with that many young children. Having six 6-year-olds is very challenging. Even though they're very used to having cameras around, they're not used to acting on film, memorizing and trying to figure out lines to say. But it was a great experience; it was like a roller coaster. I had a great time, and overall for everybody the experience was great-for the kids, for us and for Kate." "Kate Plus 8" is a Figure 8 Films-produced reality TV show that has followed Kate Gosselin through raising her children. Originally airing on Discovery Health as "Surviving Sextuplets and Twins" and "Sextuplets and Twins: One Year Later", TLC took over the production in the third year as "Jon and Kare Plus 8" until the two divorced. The show now focuses on single mom raising multiple children-five girls and three boys-on her own. Constantly searching for new material for the show, producers noticed that the children had begun performing plays on their own. "The Gosselin kids were always making up stories and plays and tbings like that, so we were forever trying to think of great new episode ideas,'' Kirk Streb, partner and executive producer for Figure 8 Films. said. "We thought we could bring someone in to help them do something a little more TVfriendly. I thought of Melissa for that and, as usual, it just turned out wonderful. She's so good at what she does." · Streb's daughter had attended Movie Makers summer camps multiple times as a kid. so be was familiar wilh the process. Of course, Lozoff said the Gosselins' personalities fell right in line with the idea. "The kids are very precious and dramatic.'' she said."One of the Older girls, Madelyn. loves to do plays and act and perform. I think everybody had a really good time, but I think she had the most fun." The Movie Makers process generally varies depending on the age group. but overall Lozoff works to help children discover who they want their story to be about and then moves from there. "What we do is we find out what character they want to play, and we sort of develop the story around the characters." she said. "Plot isn't as impottant as creating characters and stretching their imagination." The Gosselin kids were no exception, though with Madelyn, 10, taking such a strong interest, Lozoff said she had to do a balancing act. "Mady had a couple of really strong ideas for having a story," she said. "She sat down and sort of told me some of her story ideas. The six little kids just wanted to be pirates or animals. They didn't care about the story: they just had characters they wanted to be. We incorporated that into her story and tried to make both ofthem make sense." Aside from the acting and the writing. the group also got to work behind the scenes. practicing with the camera, using a clapper board to count out takes and experimenting a little with directing. Lozoff handed out small point-and-shoot cameras that the kids could practice filming with, which was a big hit. "They see people filming them all the time, and they don't really get to touch those cameras," Lozoff said. "So that was fun for them." After the. few days of movie making in March, Lozoff traveled back to North Carolina to edit. At the end of May, she returned to Pennsylvania with the finished product. "What I do for Movie Makers is I usually rent out a movie theater. and we show our movies on the big screen,'' she said. "What we did with the kids is we had a movie premiere in their basement. We had a red carpet and a big projector." Though the general process followed with Lozoff's routine at Movie Makers, working with eight siblings so close in age did present some challenges. "They were really sweet to each other: and then sometimes they turn," she said laughing, of the brother-sister interaction. And being a set within a set didn't help matters. Both Lozoff and the production team had to be conscious of the multiple cameras around. "Randomly I'll be filming them acting and randomly there's a camera guy in my shot," Lozoff said. "We had to sort of be careful of each other. But the crew was fantastic. I would be like, 'Get out of my shot.' and they would just sort of run away. They really just stand back and film, and they let whatever happens happen. That's how reality shows are supposed to be done." Another marked difference was that the Gosselin children are no strangers to cameras. That worked as an advantage in some ways, as they seemed more savvy about where to stand to be in the shot than the average 10- and 7-year-olds - but that also had a slight downside. "I think one of the challenges for her that maybe she's never confronted is that she's dealing with a number of kids who are very familiar with cameras," Streb said. "What she capitalizes on normally with the kids she did not have because it wasn't at all new and exciting to be around cameras." But in the end, Streb said, Lozoff figured out a way to work her magic anyway. "That turned out not to be really a drawback at all because what she's really doing is drawing on their imagination and drawing on mak:ing them a part of the production process that they would never. be for the TV part of their life,'' he snid. "It turned out in many ways to be just as innocent and imaginative and fun for tltcm as it would be for kids who weren't around cameros all the time."