Teenage filmmaker from Ardattin just screened his first movie

WHEN 16-year-old Samuel Donald Huggard was told that students couldn’t make feature films, he said: “Well, bugger that, I'm going to make one.” During his summer holidays from school, Samuel from Ardattin in Carlow, undertook a huge project which saw the delivery of a 90-minute feature film that was filmed recently in a creative centre called Croi Anu in Moone, County Kildare.

Samuel played the main character of Percy and recruited TV actor, Paul Ronan, who’s also the father of Hollywood actor, Saoirse Ronan to act alongside him. Croi Anu’s Mary Pat Moloney also played a key role.

The film, Footsteps in the Sand, follows protagonist Percy Fleming who is a 16-year-old boy navigating life after his mother remarries a grieving widower – a man who turns out to be very angry and violent.

Samuel describes the film as a “coming of age story” that is “more focused on character than plot.” He said: “The central theme of the film is forgiveness and it's personified through Percy. He learns that he has to forgive his mother and his stepsister, even his stepfather, and most importantly, how he has to forgive himself.”

With acting experience from being part of short films, musicals and plays in the past, Samuel said: “I took all of that experience forward to write the script and to make this film, and to gather the cast and crew.” Samuel managed to gather around 40 people to star in the film, ranging from secondary characters to extras.

“A lot of them [the cast] are non-actors who are neighbours or friends that wanted to be in the film and wanted to support the cause,” said Samuel. “It was a huge community project.” Filmmaker Samuel is hugely grateful to everyone who pitched in to make the story come together, including Mark Ronan, who not only starred in the film, but helped Samuel with tips on how to develop scenes and how to go from script to screen with his ideas.

He was also extremely grateful to Mary Pat Moloney, who also helped out hugely with the film and offered up her space in Croi Anu for the film’s first screening.

Shooting was done by Mark Shilov – a student at the Royal Academy of Music, who also composed the film’s score.

“He did a huge amount of work,” said Samuel. “He was on set every day and has also done all the editing.” With a great head on his shoulders, Samuel wanted to get ahead of the crowd and begin creating films while still in school to better equip himself for the future.

“This is absolutely what I would love to do after school. It’s an abnormal business, and the advice I always got from my tutors was to make your own stuff. And so I decided I would go above and beyond that,” he explained.

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Samuel called this project a real triumph for the youth as it shows the immense ambition and energy young people have to create. “It shows we’re not just on our phones all the time,” he said.