HILLSBOROUGH: Pellowski emerges as a filmmaker

He’s shooting documentaries on paranormal, and horror films on zombies

By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Photo by Gene RobbinsHillsborough High grad Matthew Pellowski (in baseball cap) poses with some of his "zombie" actors at the shooting of scenes of a film, "The Dead Rising," at his alma mater, Raritan Valley Community College, this summer.
Realistic makeup is applied during a break in the shooting of a film trailer in August at Raritan Valley Community College in Branchburg.
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Gene RobbinsManaging Editor
There was always an artist brewing inside the athlete Matt Pellowski.
At Hillsborough High School, Mr. Pellowski was a baseball and basketball player who liked cartooning and illustrating. At Raritan Valley Community College, he continued to excel in sports and received the college’s scholar athlete award in 1999.
But he also studied illustration, graphic arts and film and began to narrow his choice of a career.
He chose filmmaking. Today he’s directing and writing for Red Line Studios production company in lower Manhattan and doing a diverse number of projects.
He’s busy on a feature documentary, "Last of the Breed," about a bluegrass musician named Dave Evans who spent 10 years in jail on a charge of an assault with a firearm. Over the last two months, Red Lion Studios has tracked down fellow musicians and music producers, and he and others will set out in early spring for interviews with prosecutors and others, said Mr. Pellowski.
Mr. Pellowski said he first became interested in Mr. Evans when he licensed one of his songs for use in another documentary film, "Eyes of the Mothman," in 2009.
That film tells the story of a West Virginia town that thinks it’s cursed by a tall, winged figure with horrific red eyes. People who interest themselves in the subject have had a history of being afflicted with mysterious illnesses; Mr. Pellowski himself had a hard-to-diagnose virus for seven months.
In August, Mr. Pellowski was back at RVCC, using its swimming pool and some classrooms to shoot scenes from a zombie comedy, "The Dead Rising," that he had produced, written and directed.
It’s a bit horror, action and high school comedy, all rolled into one.
It’s the story of a typical day at high school in West Virginia with all the cliques you’d find in any high school: the popular kids, jocks, nerds and skaters. Then a cataclysmic power plant explosion unleashes zombie Armageddon, and all the competing groups have to band together to turn the high school into a fortress.
Zombie movies usually have some social commentary, Mr. Pellowski said. The moral in this one is that all kinds of kids and adults can work together, and it’s not always the hero stereotypes who step up.
Biographical? Mr. Pellowski says yes.
"A lot of little moments in this movie came from my past, good and bad, at high school and college," he said.
In high school, he saw a lot of people who today will claim those days were the best of their lives, he said. Then there were others, people you knew would be different. There are those who succeed in time of adversity and those who don’t.
On that weekend, there was Mr. Pellowski in a baseball cap, instructing the jib holding a camera to go out over the water more to capture the drama of a custodian zombie rising from face down in the pool. The director called for more smoke and just the right lighting to contribute to the atmosphere.
Then he ran to the end of pool to show his actress how to hold the handle of an axe as she tiptoes onto the deck.
After graduating from Hillsborough in 1997, Mr. Pellowski continued to excel in college sports to the point of to the point of being ranked in the top 10 of the nation for rebounds in his college career. But he also soaked up life lessons from sports and learned a lot watching all kinds of personalities in all types of social situations.
His RVCC teachers in video production and film theory had a lot to do with his eventual vocation, he said.
"Before I came here, I would not have thought about film as a profession," he said. "A lot of young people are like that. They like movies, but don’t think it’s a profession to get into.
"To me it’s the best kind of art," he said.
Film combines performance, framing, special effects, wardrobe, sound . . . all kinds of tools to work with, he said.
Mr. Pellowski wrote "Dead Rising" a couple of years ago. He shopped it and could have sold it, he said, but opted to make it himself.
"Dead Rising" has characters influenced by Mr. Pellowski’s observations of the world as he saw it in his young adulthood. One is the power of potential. There’s Chip, the second-string baseball player, who turns out to be the hero of sorts. He’s awfully good at killing zombies with the Louisville Slugger.
There’s a girl next door who’s a bit of a tomboy who kills with a bow she made in shop class and rides away on her dirt bike.
There are the talented athlete and the prom queen, both of whom turn out to be pretty useless.
Mr. Pellowski and a lot of industry friends (working for free and hoping for a bigger future payday) shot four pages of content in three days. The company has a million dollars invested toward the project, said a publicist, and the scenes were for a trailer they hoped would raise $2 million more before going into principal production in the summer.
He said Tuesday the project was in post-production — writing an original score, adding special effects and layering in sound.
Even with high-powered, engrossing work, he still finds time for play, even in his field. In October, he and friends were coming off an intense job and wanted to do something fun. So they set up in a High Bridge bar and made a commercial to enter into the Doritos chip company’s annual search for potential commercials that could air during the Super Bowl.
His film was about a giant spicy nacho that runs around ruining people’s good times — screwing up people’s concentration at a golf and chess, for instance — before the obnoxious Dorito messes with the wrong person, who, ultimately, ends up eating him.
"It was a bit out there," Mr. Pellowski admitted.
Needless to say, you won’t be seeing it Sunday during the Super Bowl.