TC's Titan Band Stars in Documentary

Most companies who want to give back to their community, they write a check. TC’s Oneupweb? It made a movie.

The subject: The hardworking, fund- and musician-hungry TC West 2010 Titan Marching Band.

Never mind that no one on the Oneupweb team who had volunteered to help film, direct and edit the movie had ever filmed, directed or edited a movie before. Or that only one of the five actually had been in a high school marching band.

“We’d shot a couple two- or three-minute videos for clients’ websites before. And we had some equipment lying around from that,” says Lisa Wehr, CEO of Oneupweb. “It’s just kind of our attitude around here. If we come up with an idea, we just go for it,” she says.

The inspiration for the documentary, titled Step & Close, came from Wehr’s son, Collin, a trumpet player who became a freshman at TC West Senior High this fall. Like all kids making the leap from eighth to ninth grade that want to continue in the school band program, Collin was required to join the marching band. And that meant he was required to attend band camp – a grueling, 10-day-long, 10-hours-a-day drill session … held on an open field … in August.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of students call it quits during band camp and hang up their instruments forever.

Wowed by the struggle and determination of the 97 students who stuck out band camp and the season beyond (Collin included) – and of their fearless leaders, band directors Pat Brumbaugh of TC West Senior High and Flourney Humphreys of TC West Middle School – Oneupweb found in the Titan marching band a story worth telling, and good reason to tell it.

“The plan was to create a band-recruitment video, to show it in elementary and middle schools to help ensure the school [marching bands] had a higher enrollment,” says Wehr. “But when we spent so much time expanding on it, we started to fall in love with the story and decided to make this much bigger.”

And so they did. Weaving their cameras and microphones through the moving rows of band students throughout band camp first, the Oneupweb team went on to film and interview dozens of band members at weekly practice, on game nights, at competitions, in the school hallways, even while riding the bus.

What started as a few volunteer hours a week for the Oneupweb team has since evolved into what Wehr calls an “all-consuming chasm” – one that the team is lately devoting entire workdays to. In total, Wehr estimates her crew has put in more than 1,500 hours on the film.

Now that the documentary is complete, Oneupweb is thinking bigger than a small-scale recruitment video: It’s readying Step & Close for national release and considering submitting it to local and national film festivals. On the website StepAndClose.com folks can buy Step & Close T-shirts and DVDs of the film; all proceeds go to the TC West Middle and Senior High School band programs.

Bigger than all the plans for the film, however, is this weekend’s plan for the starring students and TC at large: On Saturday, Dec. 4 at 6:30 p.m., the Titan marching band will parade down Front St. to the State Theatre, which is hosting the documentary’s premiere for the students, their families and general public at 7 p.m. (A second showing is scheduled Dec. 5 at 3:30 p.m. At both events, donation covers admission and a live panel discussion with the TC West band directors and student players.)

Wehr says she has additional surprises in store for the students – a private after-party and more – but she won’t reveal details except to say this: “Aside from the birth of my child, it’s probably going to be the proudest day of my life.”

Click here for a sneak peek of the documentary.