Director in the making: Virginia Tech grad hopes to parlay award into career in Hollywood

Story by Chris Graham

Tim Leaton was able to meet Isaac Mwesigwa because of that video camera that he got for Christmas in middle school.

Go figure, right?

“One of the main reasons that I brought my camera over was the purpose of showing the church where their money was going, and how much it was helping these children over there,” says Leaton, who took a video camera with him to Uganda in 2005 while on a mission trip with his Richmond church.

The result - a film that he titled “Orphans in Africa,” chronicling the activities at Canaan Children’s Home, an orphanage founded by Pastor Isaac Wagaba - might end up launching Leaton into Hollywood.

A one-minute short that Leaton compiled out of the footage that he shot in Africa won the 2006 Film Your Issue short-film competition - which was judged by an all-star panel that included NBC news anchor Brian Williams, former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite and movie star and director George Clooney.

The honor led to a summer internship at Disney - and from there, who knows what will happen?

“It’s really opened so many doors for me,” says Leaton, a 2007 graduate of Virginia Tech.

“My mentors at Disney were the top executives, the vice presidents - and they were just so wonderful to work with. They had me meet with all the different heads of the departments - the heads of, say, product placement, the heads of post-production, the heads of visual effects. I kind of got a crash course on everything that goes on there. I got exposed to all the different aspects of feature-film production - from preproduction all the way down to theatrical release. It was a really great opportunity,” Leaton says.

His short features interviews with two young residents of Canaan Children’s Home - Mwesijwa and Elijah Wanyama - who talk with Leaton about what the home has meant to them personally.

“I was not going to school. My father didn’t pay for my school fees” before he died, Mwesijwa says in the film. “But I thank God because they brought me in the Canaan. Now I go to school, I get everything to eat. I thank God because of that.”

“I was so glad because I’m studying,” Wanyama says in his brief interview, “and I have hope that some day I’ll be like Pastor Isaac helping children. I thank God for that.”

The hard part about the Film Your Issue contest was condensing the footage that Leaton shot in Africa into the one-minute format required under contest rules.

“It actually wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I thought it would be extremely hard,” Leaton says. “But once I actually started trying to cut it down, the strongest parts of it already stood out in my mind - because I had worked with it for so long already and seen it so many times. So it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, really.”

Another hard bit of footage for Leaton to edit came from something he shot at Virginia Tech in the aftermath of the April 16 shootings on campus that left 33 people dead. Leaton put together a 90-second video of footage that he shot at a memorable candlelight vigil a day later that was shown far and wide.

“I heard that Penn State actually showed that at their spring football game to 71,000 people. That was neat,” Leaton says.

Degree in hand, Leaton’s attention is now on getting thousands - millions - more to watch his work.

“I’m not sure exactly what my next step is,” Leaton says. “I’m probably going to be heading back out to L.A. sometime soon. The people at Disney were telling me they could help me get more jobs at Disney when I come back out - so I’ll see. I’m ready for wherever life takes me next. I’m really not sure what’s in the future for me right now - but we’ll see.”

For further reading

Tim Leaton - www.timleaton.com

Canaan Children’s Home - www.canaanchildrenshome.org