Allison Seymour was only too happy to take over school video for CedarBridge Academy — but his future plans are a lot more ambitious.

Allison’s popular videos appear on display screens in the school’s hallways: he shoots commercials for CedarBridge and avidly covers school events for online news. The 17-year-old S4 student takes pride in his work and is keen to develop a name for himself, but admitted to The Royal Gazette that creating videos “isn’t really me”. He said: “I like making films, not video. I make the videos because I want to help people out first, but after that’s done, I’ll do the things that make me happy.”

Allison (right) has shot video for golf tournaments, the Mr and Miss CedarBridge pageant and promotional videos for his alma mater. His school sports day recap is about to go online and upcoming events such as the April fashion show or 100 Men and Women on Campus will also be captured through Seymour’s lens.

He comes from an artistic family, as well as a line of Allisons: both his father and grandfather carry the name. Drawing and painting are Seymour family pursuits, he said; his mother, Candace, works in CedarBridge’s library.

Sister Kerri is pursuing a film and media programme at Humber College in Canada, but Allison found his start at CedarBridge’s S2 media and communication classes.

“I fell in love with it,” he said. “I try to create films with whoever can help me. I use any creative idea that I come up with on any random day.

“Coming up with ideas, usually it’s like a slap in the face. You just wake up in the morning, look out the window and have an idea.”

Directors he admires inspire him to make their techniques his own.

The cameras supplied for the classroom have limited capabilities, but Allison’s big moment was acquiring his own Canon DSLR.

“It was a game changer,” he said. “It was amazing; it opened up a whole new gateway for me to express myself every time. There’s so much that I can do with it, and once I started getting into cinematography, I found the magic behind it. It’s far more interesting than making a video.”

Filmmakers he admires range from David Fincher, creator of The Social Network and Fight Club; JJ Abrams, who breathed new life into the Star Trek movie franchise; George Lucas of Star Wars fame; the more old school Francis Ford Coppola, and Christopher Nolan, in particular.

“I really like his style of movies,” he said of Nolan. “They’re based on sci-fi, but they’ve got more psychological meaning behind them. I would strive to be a director just like him; his work really inspires me a lot.”

Creating his own work has not come easily, and requires patience and determination: friends and schoolmates recruited for shoots may not show up on time, and lighting and weather can prove capricious.

Pursuing cinematography means working with surprises and having a flair with people’s individual styles.

“That’s the fun in it,” Seymour said. “You don’t want to say you had a boring career where everything went right.” As The Royal Gazette’s photographers can attest, people are often less than happy to be captured on camera.

Allison learned this in January while attending the Leadership Experience and Development conference in Washington, DC with the CedarBridge delegation.

“Every single day, people hid their faces, told me they didn’t want the camera in their faces,” he said.

The payoff was worth it, however. “When I presented it to the Student Government Association, all their faces lit up,” Allison said. “That was an unbelievable moment. They saw what I had done and liked it. Not one person said they didn’t. At moments like that, the best thing you can hear is silence. That’s when you know.” There is not a lot of Bermuda represented on film and Allison aims to change that. Juggling filmmaking with school is no easy task and over the summer he intends to knuckle down to a film of his own, with a script, dialogue and screenplay.

So far he has not graduated to paid work, but Allison has hopes for upcoming projects.

“Right now it’s only a hobby, but I hope to go into management and make it as a double career,” he said.

Asked for his favourite movie, Allison named the 1980 classic Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

“That one’s the best — the way it uses all the different elements of the story; the cliffhanger ending ... I love it,” he said.

“I’m a huge Star Wars fan. I am really looking forward to December when the next one comes out.”