Verde Valley School’s senior class co-president Finley Heller’s locally-shot short film “The Climb” was among the finalists for the Indie Youth Shorts category in the 32nd annual Arizona International Film Festival that took place April 17 through 28 in Tucson.

“After a young climber named Jason suffers a devastating fall, he begins the path of recovery but feels a pull to return to the mountain that bested him,” the short’s trailer stated. “To summit this climb, Jason knows he can’t do it alone and reaches out to an old friend to help him make it to the top.”

The film stars Pacific Leon, Koel Suby and Llianne Lydum, with an original score composed by Suby and Heller credited as the writer, director and editor.

VVS Spanish teacher John Sheedy, who co-founded the Alamos Film Festival in Alamos, Mexico, described Heller’s style as thoughtful and meticulous.

“I respect the way that Heller took an approach that’s more about the psychology of [the characters],” Sheedy said. “A lot of young people get rushed when they do their film projects. The friendship that’s involved in the film is a neat theme. You’ll see what gets [Jason] back up onto the rocks is the trust and the confidence of a friend. It’s such a sweet film.” 

Sheedy also noted that Heller’s confidence as a filmmaker as grown over time and remembered him getting the letter that told him the film had been selected.

“I was thinking, ‘I hope that he gets in, I think he’s got a pretty good chance.’ And the first day back at VVS [after spring break], he came and found me and I think I was meeting with some students, so as I was busy, he said, ‘When you have a second, can you come talk to me?’ He was glowing, it was all high-fives, and he was jumping up and down because he was so excited.”

When Heller started the film, Sheedy suggested he pick a location that would be easy to go back to shoot, as filming can become increasingly complicated when a director needs to do pick-up shots or reshoots. 

“But [Heller] didn’t want to go with anything close by, he wanted to shoot on Monkey Face, which is this big rock formation that’s above VVS,” Sheedy said. “That kid was trekking up and down Monkey Face until he got all the shots just right. And I noticed that every time he would go up with his crew they were bonding closer and closer.”

“Finley has probably climbed everything around [VVS],” Head of School Ben Lee commented.

“With this project, I wanted to make a film that was [set] in nature, and I wanted to have protagonists [who] are my age because I’m not seeing much of my age group outside of VVS,” Heller said. “I wanted to create something that could promote the beauty of nature, especially being in Sedona and trying to take advantage of the setting in the landscape. It’s gorgeous here and you forget about it, because you’re here at VVS for four years and you’re seeing it daily.” 

Heller is also an admissions adviser for new students.

“I wanted to be an RA [since] my freshman year. Part of what initially intrigued me was because of the fact it’s an authority role,” Heller said. “But I’m not interested in having power over people. I’m more fascinated by the service and giving back to my community that way … It’s been cool to get to know these people in my dorm, both in a professional way, as their RA, but also in a peer-to-peer way. But that also presents unique challenges because I’m their age, telling them to scrub the toilet, and they don’t want to. But I found a way to balance those two worlds and those two needs.”

Balancing the audio for Heller’s endeavors was his classmate Suby, a self-described “huge music nerd” who scored the film. 

“I’ve known Suby since he was a kid and he grew up in Bisbee,” Sheedy said. “He’s always been talented with music. He was in the strings program at the charter school, he plays guitar, he composes music. It’s tempting for young filmmakers just to create a soundtrack from music that’s already out there … so it was cool that Suby and Heller collaborated together and created an original score. You can pick up the vibe from the trailer that it gives a whole ’nother depth to it.” 

“One of the genres I’ve been exploring is film scoring,” Suby said. “[Heller] and I’s friendship revolves around being into movies. I’ve always been interested in how scores complement a filmmaker’s work and when I learned he was making another movie, I thought it’d be super-cool to try out the things that I’ve learned just by observing and listening while I’ve watched movies with him.”

“What dictated the kind of sound that I put over each scene in the movie was emotion,” Suby said. “I’ve had some classical training on the violin. I was able to translate that and emulate certain emotions that I wanted to come across at certain parts of the movie. I worked through the film and recorded myself doing some rough sketches sonically over the scenes that Heller had sent me, and from there I was able to convey an appropriate emotion for that scene.”

“I’m torn between landscape architecture, or music education at the University of Arizona,” Suby said of his post-graduation plans.

 Heller described “The Climb” as his first proper student film following his previous work “The Secret Society of the Red Rocks,” a mockumentary looking at conspiracy theories. In that movie, Heller took a satirical look at conspiracies by discussing how a fictional advanced ancient civilization was responsible for making the red rocks that particular shade of red.

“Finley was impressive to me from the first time I met him,” Lee said. “He also has done many of the videos that are on our YouTube page. He loves film and is amazing at it. He’s a great kid. He’s one of these high-schoolers who’s got wisdom beyond his years and is compassionate … He’s somebody who gives you hope for the future.”

“‘The Climb’ has become a spectacle now in the way. No one has seen it yet except for my family and a few of my friends, and the trailer is out and it’s exciting,” Heller said. “I’m curious to see the life that it takes on when people actually see the film, and what people think of it and how it stacks up to expectations. But in terms of the [world within the story], I think that those characters are far off enjoying another climb in some other part of the world. I think that the adventure never stops for them.”